After a brief family discussion between Callie and Carter on the merits of going to Universal Studios when there were so many Japan things we could do, we proceeded with our original plan of going to the park. My first observation is price. Although the tickets are similar to Disney, everything else is more expensive. The water in the vending machines is $3 instead of $1.50 and the food is pricier as well. There is also a lot more international people here. I still don't think there are many people from the US but I'm hearing a lot more languages here than anywhere else that we've been.
We popped into Schwab's Pharmacy and I don't know if we've ever gone inside one at the other parks because this one was not a pharmacy at all. It was a front for a Nintendo themed bakery of some kind. Callie had a pink drink and Carter had a green cheesecake taco. Kerry made some effort to explain our last name to the lady at the counter by showing her drivers license but we didn't get any special treatment and I don't think she understood what Kerry was saying anyways.
Kerry and Carter had already been in the park for an hour and Callie and I had showed up later. They had gone on a couple rides including a crazy roller coaster that hangs you upside down and does loops and corkscrews. No thank you. They had to go through a secondary metal detector and had to show they had nothing in their pockets. I guess that is for the safety of the people on the ride but also the spectators on the ground as the ride takes you over several areas where people are walking. Our first ride was Jurassic park which is similar to Splash Mountain where you are in boat roller coaster. After that we did Jaws before heading to Nintendo World.
This area is relatively new so it still has a virtual queue. Even with that, we had to line up for about 15 minutes once it was our time. After they scan your ticket they do a fist pump and say some sort of Super Mario phrase that I didn't quite understand. I think they would be faster if they skipped that step. Once we were inside, the area itself was purposely not very big and combined components of many different Super Mario games. We didn't stay long because even though we had a spot in the virtual queue once you were inside there was still a 3 hour line up for the rides, exasperated by the fact that the other Nintendo ride was broken.
If we were to change one thing about our trip I think it would be to have an extra day in Osaka. That would have allowed a full day at Universal and then another full day to explore. As it was, we had to get to Osaka Castle before it closed at 5:00p. The area surrounding the castle was impressive with parks and a giant moat. The castle itself looked interesting from the outside and was well done in the inside but was more like a museum. They had added 8 floors of stairs and galleries up the middle allowing you to walk up to the top to see the view of Osaka. I would have liked to see more about the actual construction of the building.
After the castle we took a train to the Dotonbori shopping district. This is another outdoor market that has been mostly covered in glass. It included blocks and blocks of both food and shopping and was organized chaos. It also included a canal down one of the main sections that included tour boats. Carter found another one of his Don Quixote Mega stores and wanted to pick up a few final souvenirs that he had missed the first time around. I can't imagine living in one of the apartments above the street. You'd have access to everything you needed but I don't think it's quite very often. Callie took us to two final spots in the market area.
Any good tour guide nowadays needs to be plugged into TikTok. First up was a number of buildings with screens and advertisements similar to time square. For some reason she was looking for the picture of the man running. I'm not even sure what it was advertising but I guess it shows up in many Instagram photos. Carter helped us find a giant crab and dragons. Next up was some sort of special cheese cake place. There was a fresh and not fresh line up. Not fresh just meant it was baked earlier in the day where fresh was done immediately. It was a mix of fluffy cake and fluffy cheese cake and was very good. I guess TikTok is good for something.
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