We had grand plans for shopping, Osaka aquarium and a visit to Osaka castle for the 3d illumination after dark, but once again temperature and motivation were barriers to getting everything done that we wanted to do.

I think our ambitious schedules, which worked at the beginning of the trip, are just starting to catch up with us a little too much, and we're actually having to make a conscious effort to slow down now.

We actually had a slow and fairly relaxing start to the day for a change, and we weren't out of the hotel until after 11am. Checking the weather report before we left, it reported that the top temperature for the day in Osaka was 3 degrees, with a low of minus 3, and the conditions for the day would be intermittent snow.

As we stood in our apartment looking out over Osaka harbor as the warm sun shone down, we started to think it was another case of a wildly inaccurate weather report.
By the time we'd got down to the ground floor, and out through the lobby into the open air however, we began to suspect that the weatherman might have been right after all. Again the wind was bitterly cold, and we were surrounded on 3 sides by ominous looking grey cloud.

We made it as far as Universal City walk, a few minutes from the hotel, before stopping at Starbucks for the morning coffee. I'm going to miss Japanese Starbucks when we leave.
Sitting drinking the coffees, Veronica glanced outside and noticed that it was snowing. Not much, but enough for a couple of foreigners to run outside and have a mock snowball fight like complete idiots.

The snow didn't last long, so we returned back inside to finish our drinks.
After some brief planning for the day we decided that since it was almost lunchtime we'd do some shopping, and have some lunch before making our way to the aquarium.

The girls and I all want to try Bubba Gump Shrimp, but honestly the menu doesn't look that great, and the prices aren't doing it any favours either. We wandered past it, and checked our each of the other restaurants in Universal City, avoiding Hard Rock Cafe and the restaurant with the unpronounceable name that we ate at last night.

We walked past an Indian restaurant, and there was a really annoying, persistent Indian guy with a hybrid Indian/Japanese accent. He really, really wanted us to enter his restaurant, and apparently he doesn't understand NO in either Japanese or English. We had no choice but to ignore him and pretend that he wasn't there begging for our patronage. His sad pleas, combined with his completely empty restaurant didn't do much to encourage us to enter his venue.

The tonkatsu place I wanted to try wasn't open, and the ramen place I want to try was full, so we settled on an Ome Rice restaurant which looked quite good.
Ome Rice is basically flavoured rice, wrapped in omelet, topped, stuffed or sitting next to virtually anything you can imagine.
The ome rice dishes come in sizes Super Small (SS), Small (S), Medium (M) and Large (L).

The difference between the small and the large is around $4, and as we found out when the meals were served, these sizes also differ by about a kilogram in rice and toppings.

Isabelle ordered a pancake kids meal, Charlotte and Angela ordered ome rice gratans, Veronica ordered a medium ome rice with tonkatsu, and I ordered a large ome rice topped with hamburger.

The Small sized ome rice dishes at the table next to us came out first, and I got a little worried. They looked sufficient for a light to average meal.
When Veronica's medium ome rice came out, I got a little more concerned again, because the medium size was huge. But it looked absolutely fantastic.
Then the poor waitress turned up carrying my meal. It required its own special oversized plate to support it, and the rice and omelet itself was around 3 inches thick.

Charlotte wasn't overly fond of her dish, but loved mine, which worked out well because with both of us eating it, we got through a decent amount of it.
Veronica was stumped a little over halfway through her meal too. If we ever go back there, which is unlikely considering the limited time we have left, we'll know to order around half of what we ordered the first time.

The ome rice was absolutely fantastic though. Easily the best ome rice I've ever had. A sign of a good restaurant in Japan, or pretty much anywhere in my experience, is a crowd. Not long after we were seated, the entire restaurant just filled up with lunch patrons. I'm sure the sad, needy Indian guy's restaurant would still have been completely empty.

Halfway through our meal, we noticed that outside the snow had started falling again, this time much thicker and heavier than before. Naturally this meant that Charlotte and I stopped eating, grabbed the cameras and ran outside, in just our t-shirts, so we could film and take photos of the snow. We must have looked like the biggest, coldest pair of tourists. We certainly got some funny looks from passers by as the scurried to get out of the snow, dressed in their 5 layers of jumpers, jackets and thermal underwear.

After the mini snowstorm had subsided we returned inside to finish our meal, or at least eat as much of it as we could without making ourselves sick.

To get to the aquarium today we had to take 3 separate trains, and not once were we out of site of the hotel. It would have been quicker to swim across to the aquarium than to take all of the trains that we did.
There is shuttle ferry service across to the aquarium dock, and from what I can tell it leaves from right out the front of our hotel, but it isn't in operation at present for some reason, so the trains were our only option.

After around 40 minutes and one minor setback, which saw us on the wrong train traveling the exact wrong direction, we found our way to the subway station, and made our way towards the harbour side. Very very cold, but largely uneventful, aside from Charlotte walking into a lamppost, we arrived at the Osaka Aquarium shopping complex, which thankfully was very quiet. I'm assuming because it was a little overcast and a little cold that the majority of people were afraid of death by hypothermia, and decided to stay home.

As far as aquariums go, Kaiukan is pretty impressive. Not cheap, but it is a very cool way to fill a couple of hours, especially if you have kids.
Patrons buy their tickets outside, and are led immediately through a souvenir store, and into an aquarium. Immediately after the gift shop you're led through a fishtank tunnel, to get you into a fishy mood, before boarding a very long and steep escalator to the top floor. After the escalator, the path through the aquarium immediately begins to snake downwards around the outside of the building, roughly around the outside of the main attraction, the massive tank containing larger fish, sharks, rays and 2 smallish whale sharks.

The aquarium is arranged into regions, representing different areas of the Pacific Ring of Fire, which basically consists of a horseshoe shape which extends from New Zealand in the south west, up through eastern Asia, then across and down the west coast of North and South America.

Charlotte and Angela really enjoyed all of the exhibits, even though they'd seen them all before, and they'd changed very little since they were last at the aquarium. Isabelle however, absolutely loved it. Her favourites were the otters, even though it was impossible to convince her that they weren't meercats, and the the dolphins and seals, who would come up and play with her as she pressed herself against the glass of their tanks, which turned out to be a popular side attraction.

One of my personal favourite attractions of the park was the petrified capybara. A single capybara sat in a tank with wide eyes, perfectly still, unable or unwilling to move. We didn't understand why it looked terrified, until we looked beneath the water at the front of its tank, and realised that it had been put into the piranha exhibit. It must have been a very bad capybara recently.

The main central tank of the aquarium is huge, but once you've seen it a few times it does start to get repetitive. They'd added an extra whale shark since last time we left, which meant you got to see a whale shark swim past roughly twice as often, but other than that, and a few decent hammerhead sharks, it really isn't too interesting. Put a few tiger sharks and great while sharks in there. That would make it much more exciting.

After around 90 minutes of walking through the aquarium, the novelty starts to wear off, and you inevitably find yourself walking quicker path the final exhibits. At least the crowd levels were low today, unlike last time we visited, so we had no problems getting to anything we wanted to look at.

We paused briefly at the exhibit of the giant Japanese spider crabs, which are so oversized, almost comically so, that they appear alien like.

A new exhibit this time around was the petting exhibit, which was a big hit with the kids, Aside from a penguin exhibit, which was incredibly noisy and crowded with humans since it was in the middle of feeding time when we walked in, this room contains a large shallow tank filled with a variety of toothless sharks and stingrays with their barbs clipped. After washing your hands you're free to prod and poke the poor sharks and rays until they inevitably get sick of it and swim away. At least they provided charts on the walls with suggested areas of the fish where to poke and where not to.
This one was probably the most popular exhibit with the kids.

The fish harassment exhibit was the end of the aquarium, aside from several photo sellers which will take your photo with plastic fish, and then sell it back to you, and yet another souvenir shop, just in case you'd changed your mind about buying stuffed fish since passing through the first gift shop at the entrance.

Out into the cold night air, which was a huge contrast of the overly warm interior of the aquarium, and we made it as far as the shopping mall next to the aquarium, where we stopped for ice-creams and more 100 yen shopping. When the girls used the bathroom, they found an abandoned iPhone that someone had obviously left behind. Handing it into the nearest food stall, the staff member took it center management for lost and found.

On the agenda for tonight was to be Osaka Castle, which currently has a 3d illumination projected onto the castle, but it became obvious after the aquarium that it was just going to be too much for one day. Since we're still here for another full day, we decided to postpone Osaka Castle to tomorrow night, and just take our time with shopping, and grab some dinner back at Universal City.

Getting back home was naturally a matter of performing the same annoying 3 train route that we did earlier in the day, but only in reverse. We've generally had decent luck with connecting trains, but there is almost always a 5 to 15 minute wait between connecting trains. We couldn't believe our eyes when we got off one of the trains, and waiting with open doors on the other platform was, from what we could tell, the next train we needed to take us to Universal City.

We all ran from one train, and jumped on the other. What worried me initially was that nobody else did the same thing. Secondly the train we got on was almost empty, which in itself is unusual. Then Veronica said "Is this actually the right train?!". With this, I stepped off the train to read the illuminated sign on the side of the train carriage.
Immediately after I'd stepped off the train, holding the bag, and the rail passes, the alarm sounded, and the doors began to shut.

At this point, any sensible person would have let the doors shut, and just waited 9 minutes for the next train. Not me.

I ran back to the doors before they had closed completely, and since I had bags in my hands I thrust both of my arms through the doors, so that the doors closed on my forearms, jamming them together. A loud buzzing sounded, and using my forearms I forced the almost closed doors into reverse, and prized them open. This triggered the emergency door opening mechanism which kicks in whenever a human or other inanimate object gets jammed in the doors, and another, angrier alarm and buzzer sounded, and all doors on the right hand side of the 8 carriage train opened up.

With everybody on the entire train, including the conductors at both ends of the train, and the couple of rail officials who standing on the platform, now all staring at me with either horrified or disapproving looks, I boarded the train and took my seat. Oops.

After the aquarium, shopping and the somewhat more interesting train ride, we were all pretty exhausted, so we made a pact to not spend an hour deciding on a dinner venue tonight. That meant that the loudest, brashest restaurant enticed us in. That venue, when you get out of the train at Universal City is TGI Fridays. This restaurant, which from what I can tell is a restaurant chain in the US, is about as American as you can imagine. Right down to the wait staff, which all spoke perfect English, in American accents, and in keeping with the slogan "It's always Friday at TGI Fridays" they were monotonously upbeat and peppy. It was actually a lot of fun, and it was a massive contrast to the borderline suicidal hipster waitstaff at the Hard Rock Cafe.

Veronica and I went with burgers, and the girls all went with kids meals, and it all came out very quickly. Charlotte got the cheeseburger, and Angela and Isabelle got the chicken tenders kids meals.
My burger was the biggest burger I'd ever seen. split into 2 halves, it took up the entire plate, and was absolutely fantastic. Bigger, but not as tasty as the Center 4 quattro burger at Takayama a week ago, it was good, but the Center 4 burger still sits at the top of my all-time burger list. The title is safe for now.

Completely full, we skipped desert and returned to the hotel for what is, sadly, our 2nd last night.
On the agenda for tomorrow, honestly, isn't much. We're keeping our fingers crossed that the weather is kind to us so that we can do Osaka Castle, and other than that, we'll probably make it up as we go along.