Purple Monkey Osaka

The Kansai area is very fun to live in because Kyoto is just one hour away from Osaka. It's like living in Philadelphia and getting to New York in just under an hour. It also costs about $4 to do it. I have classes in Osaka every Thursday but it rarely gives me an opportunity to explore so the first weekend in December I finally convinced Helene to get out there for a day of shopping.

The shopping was incredible. Apparently, all the aristocracy once lived in Kyoto and Osaka was a merchant town. Thus, today there's little in the way of tourism there but the shopping is great.

The area we went to was like the Times Square of shopping.





The amount of stores and restaurants crammed into this neighbourhood can make even the biggest shopaholic go crazy. Most of it looks like this. Hundred of people down the little covered street and every intersection goes off into more streets of shopping madness. Mostly clothes but there were plenty of baubles.

Every one of these signs is some form of store or restaurant. This little place in the corner was the Thai restaurant where we had Blunch (see, I told you it would be a thing). Now I don't know about Thai food in Canada but the stuff I had here was so good I couldn't believe it. It's really true what they say that Asian restaurants overseas never taste the same. I have no idea why. One particular thing that many restaurants seem to employ here is a different system than the waiter harassment system so popular in North America. Rather than the waiter coming to your table and asking you lots of questions when you don't want them to, they leave you alone. Nor is this like the French system, where they leave you alone and forget about you, your order and your drinks, no this system is much better. I'm pretty sure some up-scale restaurants use it in the West but here it's common in many places for there to be a button at the table for you to get the attention of your waiter at anytime. Basically it rings like a doorbell and your table number comes up on their scoreboard. Very convenient.
Yes it's very colourful and I loved looking around at all the pretty lights everywhere.

I love this advertisement. Not sure what is says but I would think its "Even though I'm lost in time, in hostile lands, I can only think of finding the Toshiba Regza TV".

We ended up picking up some local Osaka specialty foods/treats. That's another thing they have here in Japan, specialty sweets. Every city or area makes some kind of speciality snack that you cannot buy anywhere else in Japan. So when Japanese people travel in Japan it's customary to pick up said special snack from wherever they go and share it with their friends upon their return. I always get some crazy sweets from all over Japan from my students because they love to travel. Take this little crunch Mt. Fuji with the white chocolate snow on the top and the dark chocolate on the bottom. They were really tasty kind of like a high quality CRUNCH bar with less sugar.

Purple Money Dishwasher. Yes a purple monkey pet store. And do they sell monkeys...Yes they do. Some of them were really cute and if I could afford the $2000 price tag then it might be worth thinking about it. Not sure how legal this is in other countries though. What's funny is that two of the moneys that they were selling were so ugly, I wondered who would ever buy them. Yeah, I'm heartless.
I think one day I will have to buy a monkey. I hope it doesn't give me a new strain of disease that my body is not yet ready to deal with. I guess we'll have to wait and see. Really thinking about getting a pet in the near future. Maybe a dog but most likely a cat. I've never been a dog person but I've mutated into one.

So back to the shopping. It's fun to go into specialty stores that offer European goods and you get really excited at the prospect of paying $5 for bacon bits. I never really ate bacon bits very much but now it seems important to.

If the little streets and shopping district weren't enough for you, take a look at this picture. Above this building is a highway. This building may not look like much on the outside but on inside it goes up four floors and down two or three. This thing is long and FILLED with clothing shops. It was mostly formal wear or classy clothes. No real name brands like Gap or Tommy. This place was more for suits, hats, kimonos and nice accessories like briefcases. I guess I found where the rich conservatives shop.

Not really sure what this was originally but it appears that once upon a time you could pay and ride these little round booths all the way up for a view of the city. I suppose when that became lame they renovated this building into a super discount store. We must have been in there for over an hour. It was hard to find the way out. Maybe it was once a fun house.

Don't get me started on how much Hello Kitty crap they have in this county. Yeah, I'm adorable. But most Japanese know "Hello Kitty" as "Kitty Chan". I suppose that sounded too oriental to sell worldwide.

This was a sign I found on the boardwalk. I guess it means no signs. Kind of hypocritical if you ask me.




The day was fun. I ended up buying a Gundam, and Helene found some clothes. A nice sweater can run you about $18, that's really impressive. Oh and Gundams are the #1 toy in Japan. I'll talk more about it when I finish my current one. I'm a geek.

And Sega is the biggest video game arcade name in Japan. Back in the day they lost the home gaming war to Nintendo. Guess now you know where they ended up.Good for them.