Osaka Day 3: Strength and Devotion

Written by Stan

After a great night out in the city, the group luckily got to sleep in a bit today. We left around 10am to our first destination for today: Osaka Castle.
This 8 story museum located in the main building of the old castle showcased a lot of historical artifacts and letters, mostly related to the creator of the castle, his life and his conquest of various other regions and countries.
After spending a couple of hours at the museum, I decided to get a refreshingly cold drink with a small group of people, before grabbing some lunch from a street vendor and walking back to the Metro station, where we took an above ground line to our next destination: Sumiyoshi Taisha Temple

This temple functions as the main shrine for all Sumiyoshi shrines in Japan. Inside, we made an offering at one of the shrines, stroked a lucky rabbit for good health, almost crashed a baby shower due to the language barrier and saw some baby turtles.

After a long day and a lot of walking, I decided to go back to the hostel to relax for a bit, before going to a small ramen place for dinner. We visited Dotonbori to see the running man and browse Don Quijote, a large supermarket which sells everything you can imagine and more.

While walking back to the hostel, we spotted a sign for a ‘Milk bar’, which intrigued us. While they did not serve milk as we had hoped, it did end up being a great whisky bar frequented mostly by locals. Knowing that we had no plans for tomorrow morning, we decided to round out our day with some drinks.