Japan 2019 - Back to Osaka

It is amazing how you can cycle from Kyoto to Osaka by following a green strip along the river with a cycling path all the way! So much easier than navigating the congested roads with hundreds of traffic lights! They even built some special cycling corkscrew access to an island!

We didn’t know that in Osaka you have to pay to park your bike and received our first parking ticket warning. Imagine trying to get your impounded bikes back 24 hours before the flight and with my very limited Japanese! We investigated and found a close-by underground bike parking station.

We had three more days in Osaka, plenty of time to explore some more sights, visit a few museums and wash the bikes. Some places are a bit crazy, a restaurant full of tame owls that you can pat, seafood restaurants with a big tank where you catch your own fish, a pub with sumo sized meals (I watched a skinny Japanese eat a basketball-sized bowl of french fries!) and outdoor rock climbing on a sky-scraper!
Shinsekai is a fun place to visit at night time.

Kirsten loves the Japanese creme caramel, so I wanted to buy her the sumo sized one!

Shinsaibashi and Dotonbori are busy night and day!

We had another great meal here in a teppanyaki restaurant.

The Museum of Housing and Living has a real size reconstruction of a street in Osaka during the late Edo Period (1830s). Their attention to detail was amazing. They even changed the environment from day to night time, full moon, sunrise, clouds, thunder, fireworks. Very interesting!

This is a small model of modern city housing in Japan.

The Swissotel kept our bike boxes for six weeks, so we spent the last night above Namba station again.