Gaming the Day Away

As I wrote this morning, the plans for Day 6 is to journey to Northern Osaka and see the "downtown" area up there. Despite the fact that we call it northern Osaka, in truth it is the main base area where all the large corporations and companies operate from. If you were to compare it to Toronto, Northern Osaka would be the Bay street or Dundas area.

We had several goals that we wanted to accomplish the first of which was to visit the Central Post Office that is located there. In an attempt to finally get some currency exchange for me. The last few times we've tried at different banks and post offices resulted in failure due to either the banks being too small to do currency or it was a golden week holiday so the establishment was closed. That being said, we were successful this time. Finally!

After the post office, we headed toward our second goal, the anime shop Mandrake. But before that our hunger stopped us from proceeding. Many restaurants and fast food joints operated the busy streets. After looking at the various menus, we finally chose one that appeared to have some suitable vegetarian options for Colin.




At first we thought we had to wait for seats because it was busy but the waiter told us to follow him outside the restaurant and around the corner to another building. Apparently the establishment had actually two locations within 2 minutes of each other. I would assume this would allow for serving more costumers.

Anyways, once seated we browsed through the menus and got another surprise. You see when we originally chose the restaurant we had thought they served ramen or rice dishes. But in truth what they served was Okonomiyaki/ "As-you-like-it" Pancake.

This is a dish I have eaten back in Canada, but the ones they serve here a several times larger with much more toppings.




We each got different orders. Matt was a seafood-styled Okonomiyaki that had shrimp mixed into it. I believe there was a strip of bacon within the pancake as well.











Colin's was a 5 cheese Okonomiyaki. We weren't able to analyze the cheeses closely, but I believe some were Chedder, Brie, and Mozzarella.












As for mine, it was the restaurant's signature item I assume. Since it had big exciting characters next to it in the menu. Mine had two strips of bacon on top, with ground beef on it was well. Within the batter, I believe it had cubes of Konjac jelly placed in it.








We had no idea how to cook these, thankfully the waiters offered the service of cooking it for us. The pancakes had to be cooked pretty well since the batter is quite thick. This involved flipping it several times. I got a bit impatient and thought the waiter said it was ready and started adding toppings. They told me otherwise much to my embarrassment =P


And here they all done with their toppings, right before we dug in.



After the lunch we headed back out and proceeded towards Mandrake. Along the way the temptresses that are Game Centres called out to us again. Matt was really happy when he found a Project Diva machine in the first one we went to.


How many Project Diva games can he find in a day? ヽ（´ー｀）┌

Besides this one ,there were more bigger named arcades. One wass a location called Namco Land and the other was SEGA Umeda Joypolice. In this case Namco proved superior.

Here are some arcade cabinets I found amusing. A Super Mario Bros. arcade machine.

And a Typing of the Dead cabin


Mandrake and the other anime shop we found, Animate, are specialty stores specializing in all things anime. Including cartoons, comics, games, etc. You can see some photos of the inside of Mandrake in Colin's Post.


Aside from going to anime shops and arcades. We didn't really do much in North Osaka surprisingly. I can say safely that we have conquered Osaka. Mission Get-O （￣ー￣）