Osaka

Jarek has to e-mail me some photos, so sorry, you'll have to wait a bit for them.

For my birthday we went to Osaka, and it was a great choice, because I think this city is the entertainment center of Japan; hundreds of shops, bars, restaurants, shopping arcades... You can basically find anything you want there.

We heard that Osaka's love hotels are famous because of their general weirdness, so we decided to embark on a journey to find one (I've obviously never been in one before, and I could only find an opportunity to visit when Jarek was here). Contrary to popular belief it's not so easy to find it - you have to stray from the main streets and find more "discreet" places, but when you finally stumble upon one, there's usually a whole lot of them in one spot. The easy way to recognize them is that they usually don't have windows, the buildings are particulary ugly and there's a sign in front of them informing you about the prices.
This part of the story ends here for obvious reasons. :P

For lunch we decided to have okonomiyaki again - but those Osaka-style are very different from the ones we ate in Hiroshima. Plus the shop owner was kind enough to give us obanyaki (hot cake with sweet bean or custard filling) as a bonus. We walked around Nanba and Nihonbashi (I will have to visit Amerika-mura to find a present for my baby brother - the stuff you can find there...) districts and then we moved to see the Osaka castle, which is really impressive, but unfortunately it's a concrete replica, as the original was destroyed during the war.

I will write more when I have the photos!