Today, we only planned for a quick morning trip to Nishiki Market, and then a day trip thereafter to Osaka. So we had our breakfast a little later than yesterday at Mume, and it was another round of home-baked breads (all flavours different from yesterday’s) and home made jams again. Didn’t bother to take photos this time.
We reached Nishiki Market at around 9am, and actually that was still a little too early. Most of the shops weren’t open. But we just slowly strolled through the market and browse those that were opened. We noticed that the vegetables in Japan are all so pristine and perfect looking! ZERO soil on them. Not even on root vegetables! Are they amazing or what? O_O
After walking through the entire market (which was actually just one long stretch of path), we then made our way to the nearest train station to catch a train to Nippombashi in Osaka, as we were both interested to visit the Kuromon Ichiba market. (Yes we are both fans of street markets and supermarkets). I mis-navigated a little, but we still find ourselves at where we wanted to be in the end.
The first thing that we queued for – Okonomiyaki, of course! Okonomiyaki, takoyaki and yaki soba are famous in the Kansai region – of course that’s what we’d want to eat in Osaka! This stall is supposed to be famous, and there are quite a few people queuing for it, so queue we did! And it’s really good!
We then meandered down the various stalls, looking for more finger food along the way. Got some kobe beef cubes (extremely expensive but they are da bomb! SO TENDER AND JUICY!), and scallops which weren’t very sweet actually. Had some beef yakitori as well, but we forgot to take photo of that before Bruno just wolfed it down. Eeeps.
We were actually still not really full, so we went to the shopping streets in Namba to find a proper lunch. We picked one basement restaurant, not noticing that it says Izakaya. We were shocked when we saw a group of people smoking IN the restaurant the moment we stepped in. I was contemplating to change our lunch place as both of us were really sensitive to cigarette smoke, but then we just decided to stay, eat and get it over with. I ordered the steak for myself, and the ika to share and he helped me eat some of the fries too. We then quickly just leave right after we finished eating – I HATE CIGARETTE SMOKE. I still don’t understand why would any country allow smoking inside an establishment. Argh. Bad experience.
By the time we were done, it was only about 3pm in the afternoon. It was really still too early for us to head to Dotonbori for dinner, and besides we just had lunch! We both didn’t really like shopping, so we decided to find a place to drink coffee while waiting for the time to pass. Bruno kept wanting to try Tully’s Coffee, so we decided to head to Yamada Denki as they have a Tully’s Coffee joint there as well. It turned to be something like an electronics mall-building, and Tully’s is on the second or third floor, can’t remember that clearly now. It was good that it wasn’t a major shopping mall though – there were significantly less people, and we were able to sit there for almost 2 hours, chatting randomly and surfing on our phones. Finally at around 5pm, we left the building and head back to Namba station as Dotonbori was just around the corner of the station.
Dotonbori was… crowded. There were many eateries, restaurants and souvenir shops everywhere, and we had a hard time choosing our dinner place. We finally settled on a yaki soba restaurant, and it was an interesting concept. Every table had a steel frying area on it. Basically you order your yaki soba, and the chef downstairs will fry it up, and they will serve it up to you and dump it on the frying area on your table and heat up the plate to keep the yaki soba hot. It’s a nice concept, but it made the whole place hot. Yup, hot. Anyway, he ordered teriyaki yaki shoba, while I ordered shio yaki soba…. not realising that ONE serving serves two. OMG. My shio yaki soba was served first, and we were shocked by the huge serving. The other yaki soba was already being fried up, so we had no choice but to ask to pack the other portion as a takeaway, which we eventually gave to the Mume staff. But man, the yaki soba WAS SO GOOD. It was THE BEST yaki soba I’ve ever had, and I’m not even kidding.
Finally we dragged our big bellies back to Mume, not forgetting to drop in the nearby Family Mart to get my favourite Strawberry Mixed Veggies Juice (I’ve been drinking it almost every day while I was in Japan, because vegetables were so scarce there in their dishes!) to drink while working away on my emails and invoices at night in the hotel room. Yup, I was working the moment we stepped back to the hotel room every night, only taking breaks to shower and work again till my mind’s too tired to continue. Bruno on the other hand, was just playing Steam games on his laptop. What did you think we were doing back in the hotel room, eh? ;)
For more photos on this day, please click on my Flickr album link here.
For Japan Trip 2017 itinerary / content page, please click here.
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