A tale of 2 fortune tellers

Day 3: Osaka

We arrived at Osaka at ard 7 in the morning. We were quite lost and asked several pple for directions to our hotel. Osaka is so cold in the morning! After leaving our luggage at the hotel, we went for breakfast at a cafe.

Me & wp posing haha. Photographer: bx












Didn't really enjoy my breakfast cos of the royal milk tea which had too little milk in it. Oh well. this is wad u get for not knowing what you're ordering. And i was scared to go back to the counter to ask for more milk & sugar :/

After breakfast we headed for Dotonburi, one of the more popular famed shopping streets in Osaka. But it was so quiet! hardly any shops were ready at 9am. So we went to a doctor's to get wp's flu checked. We went to this doc who specialised in the respiratory tract (nose & throat) ailments. We saw only mothers and young kids at that clinic haha. The doc used a visualiser to look at wp's throat and stuff....after that she had to sit in front of a machine to breathe in the medicine vapours (!!). 面白いね！haha. i've never seen such a thing before! Then, we headed to the pharmacy where wp bought her medicine. wow.... japanese really do things differently from s'pore...

Anyways, after killing enough time with the trips to the doc's and pharmacist's, we went back to Dotonburi to fill our tummies...with takopachi! haha. This would be the first of many yaki-yaki's we'd be having in Osaka..We also bought some Daifuku

Asmost of the shops were still closed, we eventually entered a fortune teller's to have bx's fortune read for fun. It was quite interesting...we had major communication difficulty cos the fortune teller, an old lady, was speaking in kansai-ben (kansai dialect). Never mind that we can't understand japanese as well as before, now we have to decipher kansai ben! oh my mama. But luckily wp was there to translate for us :)

Then it was lunchtime! We went to eat okonomiyaki. The lady boss made it at her stove before serving us to we didn't get to make it ourselves. *disappointed*

My okonomiyaki with pork & cheese.















I was having a sore throat then but what the heck. Heaty or not, when in Osaka, better indulge in its famous okonomiyaki! Yum~ Oil...fried...hoho....hunger!

After lunch, we wandered a bit in the back alleys of Dotonburi and saw a street full of host clubs (where female clients pay for the company of male escorts). All closed in the day, of course. We got back to Dotonburi proper and went to another cafe called ビックリドンキ (meaning shocked donkey. haha wad a cute name!) and ate dessert. (It's near the shop with the giant red crab on the signboard) It was frequented by mostly middle school kids. We looked like oldest there. It was rather dimmed, and furnished like a treehouse - with green leaves and little birds peeking out from the log-covered walls.

After that we then went for Karaoke at Big Echo, one of the karaoke chains (kinda like k-box) in Japan.

After lunch, i went to a fortune teller's too, but this time i tried a diff one. This one wasn't so believable as the first haha. I felt that she was smoking her way thru :p Like, she said weird stuff like i should wear black because of something about the sun...and i'm the rain (???). Damn couldn't understand what she was trying to say cos she kept using metaphors abt nature (rain, mountain, sun, etc). She told me to do something in a teaching position, such as a cooking teacher haha. I asked whether i will be successful as a writer and she said sth artistic is fine too. (huh? for real? teacher and writing is diff right?) when i asked about romance, she said because i was a 无戒心 type of girl, i should see a man for who he is and not get carried away by sweet talk or i could be duped. okay~ Then towards the end, the fortune teller's friend who was present (she was kinda pushy) said bx & i looked alike and asked if we were siblings. She seemed quite pleased to be able to tell but to me, if one observed our dynamics long enough, one could easily guess we were siblings and not friends. Anyway, it was time to GET THE HELL out of there cos the 3 of us were losing patience with their crapping. We paid and left.

The shops in Dotonburi weren't very exciting...eventually we were out of the street and walking along the main road, wondering what to do. The 3 of us were tired from the bus trip our spirits were quite low - we even thought of going to an onsen!

Eventually we were stuck in the back alleys which were filled with bars and diners. We entered one of the more economical diners and had our dinner (I ate omurice!). After that, when we were trying to find out way back, we stumbled into Shinsaibashi and realised that THAT was the real shopping street. DANG. And my the crowd was huge! Much better atmosphere than in Dotonburi. But we were too tired to carry on so we went back to the hotel and swore to visit Shinsaibashi the next day :)