We walk in and we're greeted by a very cute looking Japanese woman. She asks me what room number I'm in, and I tell her it's 2313 without even having to consider it. I hope she's got handcuffs!
She smiles and walks us over to our table, we pretend to sit down and take it all in for a minute, but as soon as she's out of sight we rush off to the buffet table. They have a selection of breakfast cereals, a variety of juices, two kinds of bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs, toast, buns, rice, miso soup and vegetables.
We neatly pile the food onto our plates and head back to our seats to consume and enjoy.
After breakfast, we make our way over to Nara to begin our sight seeing for the day. We start off the day by visiting the second highest pagoda in Japan, the Five Storied Pagoda, which is also a national treasure. We snap a couple of quick photos and move on.
We run into some messengers of God, Deer, and they tell us to watch our backs, and to try the green tea soft served ice cream. The entire area is filled with free roaming deers. At this moment we're looking for the Todai-Ji Temple, but before we get there we stop at the Observatory Musuem / Tourist Info center to use their washroom and drink some free green tea (so hospitable). While Steve befriends the nice Japanese lady behind the info desk, Ly and I go try the earthquake chair. It's a chair that simulates what it feels like to be in an earthquake, it wasn't as exciting at it sounded.
After that we make our way towards the temple, the path to the temple is very far away and a very long walk, luckily they have green tea soft served ice cream vendor stands available along the way. Wait a minute......So Ly and I each purchase a cone for 300Yen each, I don't recall what Steve was doing exactly, but he was probably taking pictures of little kids, but who knows he probably had one too, I don't see how anyone could resist. Before even finishing his first cone, Ly wanted to opt for another one, since he wanted to try a different flavour I believe, but we told him that there would be plenty of opportunities afterwards.
So we're all just standing there enjoying our ice cream cones, that's when a deer unknowingly comes up to Steve's back pocket and picks the ONLY tourist map of Nara that we had. This map had every single tourist attraction that we wanted to visit circled with routes on how to get to each of them outlined as well. This was a big setback and a major FML for us.
Luckily, I had taken notes and brought along my Lonely Planet Japan book, which outlined the sites that we wanted to visit and it had a semi-useful map, but at that time, it was better than nothing. So we relied on those resources to get us through the rest of the sites and day.
As we were leaving the tourist/temple grounds we noticed that there were quite a few more shops selling soft served ice cream, however this time it was 250Yen.
In my tourist guide book, it outlined a market that had plenty of food to be eaten along with a highly recommend tonkatsu place, Tonkatsu Ganko. It was high quality tonkatsu, you could watch them make it behind a clear pane of glass, the portion sizes were nice and the price was cheap. This was easily our best Tonkatsu meal in Japan.
I wanted to visit another temple but it was almost 5PM by the time we finished eating, so I knew we would never make it, so we headed back to Osaka to continue exploring there. We went to the Osaka Castle. I don't get how they could fit a castle right in the middle of a city. This is where we caught sight of the infamous fish tail.
There wasn't much time to visit any place else after Osaka Castle, since most places were closed by that time. So we headed back to the hotel to shower and freshen up. When we were all ready to leave, Steve caught us off guard by saying something we'd never thought he'd say, "ya'll go ahead, I think i'll kick it with my girl today".
So we left his tired ass and we went to go find food on a stick, it's amazing the kind of leftovers you can throw on a stick, fry it and then feed it to people. They served us liver, chicken gizarts, chicken fat, pork fat, etc. It wasn't that great of a meal, but it still cost us 3,000 Yen. Never again!
So Ly and I are sitting at the table, across from each other, nothing special, and to my left at a 45 degree angle there are another two people, one was clearly a girl, but the other one reminded me a Miss Piggy,
so naturally, I thought the other person was a girl, but Ly was very certain that it was a dude, so certain in fact that he was willing to put some money on it. Ring Ring, she, I mean he, picks up the phone and answers it in a manly tone. Dammit. I guess I was more tired that I thought.
However, I was still hungry, so we walked by a conveyor sushi belt place, but didnt' feel like stopping in to eat, so I wanted to grab a bento box, haven't had one since. I walk in, get welcomed like a King and ask the nice Japanese lady if she speaks English, she says no. So I take her by the arm and drag her outside and point to one of the many plastic food displays that they have. Now I can cross that off my mental checklist.
So we're all just standing there enjoying our ice cream cones, that's when a deer unknowingly comes up to Steve's back pocket and picks the ONLY tourist map of Nara that we had. This map had every single tourist attraction that we wanted to visit circled with routes on how to get to each of them outlined as well. This was a big setback and a major FML for us.
Luckily, I had taken notes and brought along my Lonely Planet Japan book, which outlined the sites that we wanted to visit and it had a semi-useful map, but at that time, it was better than nothing. So we relied on those resources to get us through the rest of the sites and day.As we were leaving the tourist/temple grounds we noticed that there were quite a few more shops selling soft served ice cream, however this time it was 250Yen.
In my tourist guide book, it outlined a market that had plenty of food to be eaten along with a highly recommend tonkatsu place, Tonkatsu Ganko. It was high quality tonkatsu, you could watch them make it behind a clear pane of glass, the portion sizes were nice and the price was cheap. This was easily our best Tonkatsu meal in Japan.
I wanted to visit another temple but it was almost 5PM by the time we finished eating, so I knew we would never make it, so we headed back to Osaka to continue exploring there. We went to the Osaka Castle. I don't get how they could fit a castle right in the middle of a city. This is where we caught sight of the infamous fish tail.
There wasn't much time to visit any place else after Osaka Castle, since most places were closed by that time. So we headed back to the hotel to shower and freshen up. When we were all ready to leave, Steve caught us off guard by saying something we'd never thought he'd say, "ya'll go ahead, I think i'll kick it with my girl today".So we left his tired ass and we went to go find food on a stick, it's amazing the kind of leftovers you can throw on a stick, fry it and then feed it to people. They served us liver, chicken gizarts, chicken fat, pork fat, etc. It wasn't that great of a meal, but it still cost us 3,000 Yen. Never again!
So Ly and I are sitting at the table, across from each other, nothing special, and to my left at a 45 degree angle there are another two people, one was clearly a girl, but the other one reminded me a Miss Piggy,
so naturally, I thought the other person was a girl, but Ly was very certain that it was a dude, so certain in fact that he was willing to put some money on it. Ring Ring, she, I mean he, picks up the phone and answers it in a manly tone. Dammit. I guess I was more tired that I thought.
However, I was still hungry, so we walked by a conveyor sushi belt place, but didnt' feel like stopping in to eat, so I wanted to grab a bento box, haven't had one since. I walk in, get welcomed like a King and ask the nice Japanese lady if she speaks English, she says no. So I take her by the arm and drag her outside and point to one of the many plastic food displays that they have. Now I can cross that off my mental checklist.
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