Good morning!

This one may be a little on the short side, as we spent a large portion of our day on the Shinkansen from Nagano to Osaka.

However, there are some fun things involved in the day.

Firstly, our hotel in Nagano is the Metropolitan hotel which is located next door to the train station. Rooms are so inexpensive (at least according to American standards) that we got Jordan his own room. In the mountains all of the accommodations were so expensive, but Nagano is larger with more competition. We saw a lot of people in snow gear heading on a train to the ski resorts, which I thought was brilliant. So much cheaper to do it that way.

Even though the hotel was inexpensive, it was a nice business style hotel with a fantastic breakfast buffet. Here’s what ended up with:

Mine is more western style, but they had Japanese style foods as well. They even had soft serve ice cream. So, something for everyone.

After breakfast I ran across the street to a store called Don Quijote. This is a chain store that sells everything from snacks, to clothes, to cosmetics. Every inch of this store is covered in product, and the music is blasting.

I took a video of it, but WordPress wants me to upgrade my account to embed videos, so we’re just not going to do that.

Hers a pic instead

I’ve been on the hunt to see how many KitKat flavors I can find in Japan (over 300 flavors have been released here), and was able to find a few I hadn’t seen yet. I really wanted to find a grape one that the internet told me you could only get in Nagano, but I didn’t have any luck.

Don Quijote has become famous with tourists, but locals tell me that for things like skincare they tend to overcharge, so I saved my list of skincare products I wanted to find until later in Tokyo.

The next four hours or so was us on a train, with one 30 minute stop over where I found my first 7/11 smoothie.

These smoothies have become famous in japan, because you grab a cup of frozen fruit and veggies from the freezer section, then take them to a machine with mixes them into a smoothie. The machines have clear directions on how to use them, just make sure you pay for your cup before blending them.

I loved them because they are made from real fruit and veggies, which can kind of hard to find as a tourist in Japan.

We then got back on the train.

We arrived in Osaka to find gorgeous sunny skies and nearly 60 degree temps. After the cold mountains it felt nearly tropical. We checked into our airbnb, and hit the streets.

I had heard that glasses shops in Japan have same day service on glasses, so I wanted to find one to see if I could get some sunglasses. Since o usually wear contacts I have a couple pairs of normal sunglasses, but no prescription ones. Which is a problem since I forgot my contacts.

We headed out and proceeded to get extremely lost in a giant Osaka mall system. These malls cover multiple city blocks and are like twelve stories tall. They are completely unreal. They are also incredibly busy and crowded. I wish I had taken pics of them because they are an experience of their own.

We did find our way to a huge electronics store where everything flashed and beeped at me.

Eventually I made it up to the glasses shop, where I found out that they could do same day glasses, but it would take 10 days for sunglasses. Bummer.

On the upside, we also found a cake and waffle spot .

With cool cartoon drawings

Then we decided to hit the very famous street of Dotonbori, which is a food and knickknack emporium.

They’ve got shops, arcades, and so many restaurants and food stalls. Jordan even won a dust mite from My Neighbor Totoro from a claw machine.

By this point we were all getting pretty tired, so we ducked into a bbq restaurant where got some assorted meats including wagyu.

After dinner we were all falling asleep and know we have an early start tomorrow, so we wandered back to our airbnb and went to bed.

That last pic is if a public Onsen near our Airbnb. I thought it was pretty cute.

Goodnight