Nihon Finale

Day 7:

Do you ever think about home while on vacation? Well, as we near the end of our Japan trip, although we had a blast, we actually felt that it was about time we headed home. We just relaxed during our last full day in Osaka. Originally, we had planned to take the JR to Umeda because there's some good shopping there but really...who needs to spend another 500 yen round trip per person to go there to shop when we have a never-ending strip of shopping right next to our hotel in Shinsaibashi? So were we successful in walking from one end of the strip to the other? Although we started on the shopping adventure from 10 am (most stores don't even open until 11) and shopped and ate until 9 pm (when they close) we were still defeated by the long strip. We ran out of yen in no time and had to even use our credit cards!

The following are some of the foods we ate...I won't even try to categorize the numerous foods into meals:

1. Breakfast at McDonalds...they were having chicken nuggets and McPork both for only 100 yen each...such great deals...sorry..too hungry that we forgot to take pictures
2. Curry set that comes with very yummy udon and extra tempura on the side. The whole set was very good and only cost us less than 1000 yen; it filled up both of us.
3. Green tea and ice cream set at a tea place with lots of old people and then the two of us...just a little awkward. Anyway, their green tea powder on top of the icecream together with the green tea was VERY rich...not sure if kids would like this...but you're definitely getting green tea.
4. A cream puff-like dessert from a vendor that strictly sells these only. The interesting thing about this one was that it was sakura flavour (they actually inject the flavoured cream with a needle-like aparatus) and this is only available in March and April.
5. Skewers! We went to this place strictly for skewers that we've seen people line up for every night. It's right across from the takoyaki place we went to the first day. And a 100 yen store is just a few stores down with lots of good buys! Anyway, back to skewers: they were fun to eat and good except we had difficulty ordering in the beginning with no pictures...luckily one of the waitresses dug up an English menu and she spoke Mandarin!
6. Finally we were able to have some acceptable AND cheaper ramen from "Four Kings" which was ironically next to the "Gold Dragon" where we had the horrible ramen the previous night.
7. And of course...dessert to end off the night. It was Haagen Daaz green tea icecream!
   

Day 8:

And that concludes our Japan trip as we pulled are much heavier luggage to the airport limousine bus stop to head to our connecting flight from Osaka to Vancouver via Tokyo. Of course we ate before AND during our way to the airport but those foods are not anywhere near the quality we had the previous days and don't deserve pictures. We are proud to say that our yen calculations were near perfect because P and I only each used our credit card once to buy gifts for each other and were left with only 80 yen and full stomachs as we boarded our plane to YVR.