Reid Main

Today was our second travel day of the trip and good lord it was a doozy. We were unable to find any elevators to take us down to the subway closest to our hotel so we started walking to Hakata Station assuming we'd find another entrance to the subway. That turned out to be false and after a 40 minute walk with two roller luggages, that kept getting caught on the yellow tactile paving that is on every Japanese sidewalk, we finally made it to the station.

Luckily my experience buying Shinkansen tickets in Yokohama allowed me to quickly procure us tickets to Osaka. The two and half hour trip was uneventful but the stupid QR code food ordering system was still broken so I wasn't able to order anything. By the time we arrived in Osaka I was in quite a hangry state. We checked into our hotel around 1:30pm and relaxed for about an hour before we decided to explore the town.

Our first stop was the Death Note exhibition in Nipponbashi that Elsie had heard about through Twitter. It was a really neat art gallery that actually had the original drafts used to print the manga. There were also life sized replicas of scenes from the anime as well as various statues of the characters.

Unbeknownst to us when we came here, Nipponbashi is supposedly also known as "Akihabara of the West" because of its large number of anime and otaku related stores. We definitely stumbled upon a bunch such as Super Potato, Nintendo, Pokémon Centre, One Piece, Capcom, and Tomica. We bought a bunch of gifts for friends and family before getting back to the hotel for 7pm. By now we were quite tired and grabbed a quick bite to eat at McDonald's before crashing.