Osaka
Osaka was massive. Personally, I found it typical of a bustling Japanese city. It was all lit up and busy. The comfort rooms were always of special interest to me and my little girl. There were two kinds of toilets, the sit or the squat. My little girl didn’t like the squat toilet too much.
After having dinner at a mall there, we promptly took the train back to our airbnb at Morishoji. We were disoriented for a while since it appeared to be going the opposite direction, but another friendly Japanese commuter assured us that we were on the right track.
Let me churn on this some more, to testify to the awesomeness of the Japanese railway system: we were disoriented because the train was going in one direction when some hours before, another train had gone in the opposite direction… ON THE SAME TRACK.
WTFFFFF.
Back in my country, we couldn’t even properly connect one MRT station to another, let alone plan for bi-directional trains that use the same track!
We were back at our airbnb around 10pm. We let ourselves into the house with a key that our host had casually left in the mailbox. Not exactly akyat-bahay proof, but hey, this was Japan, where crime was a rarity.
After taking a quick bath the next day and then checking out, we headed for the Keisei station (which, lego-like, was conveniently connected to a JR station) and deposited our luggage inside a coin locker. We still had half a day to slay so we took a taxi to Osaka Castle.
The taxi was a really spacious sedan that looked like a Benz. The driver was uniformed, clean, and very helpful. He looked even better than a restaurant manager back home. He came rushing out of the taxi to help the hubby lug our hard case into the trunk.
Along the way, we had seen a station aptly named Sakuranomiya, and indeed there was a park with many sakura trees, lining the river. If we had only had more time, we would have alighted from the train and taken a detour. But we had to keep moving or we would miss the train going to Kochi, which was departing before 2pm.
The park grounds at Osaka Castle were full of people celebrating the sakura trees in bloom. We promptly took a family photo underneath a sakura tree. The sun was out and the people were happily taking photos of the sakura blooms. But they kept a respectable distance from the trees while doing so.
The queue going to Osaka Castle was too long. Striking it off our list of to-dos, we decided to just hang out at the grounds for a while before going back to the station and taking the train that would deliver us to Kochi, and to my dear Mika.
PA-Q World 