P.S I realise I can change the date of the blog post, so I assigned it here, making if look as if I really wrote it after the trip haha.
8 September - Day 1
The day of going to Japan finally came! I remembers being so excited as we were going to sit the Japan airline! Oh well, I'm ma jump to the time when we already arrive there.
Our first hotel happen to be inconvenient as there were no mama shop nearby. So if we needed water, we had to either boil, or buy it from a shopping mall which required a shuttle bus to get to. And yes, we went to the shopping mall for dinner, brought by the tour guide himself.
The dinner was a buffet restaurant which is SO VERYYY heavenly. The food was scrumptious and the ambience of the restaurant is warm and friendly! My favourite was the tender beef and OF course, the dessert! They were so cute and tiny. Even the plates are tiny. So I'm forced to take small portion at a time, though I was famished.
The cranberry dessert was DELICIOUS!
And after the pleasant dinner, we shopped around the HUGE mall but we didn't have the time to finish walking! Luckily the tour guide said we will be back here for our last say as the hotel was near the international airport. We went back to the hotel in the late evening, slept and anticipated the next day!
9 September - Day 2
We had breakfast in the buffet provided by the hotel, before proceeding to the Osaka Castle. It was a castle that was once inhabited by the King in the olden century. It was amazing.
The green moss covered the entire river that once surrounded the castle.
The remaining river will do the same after a few more centuries lol.
And here's the walk to and from the castle.
The weather was cooler than what the picture depicts.
The children with yellow hats looks EXACTLY like the cartoon show Crayon Shinchan.
It reminded me of someone.
I remembered eating Ice-cream after that as the weather started to heat up, and I ate peach if I'm not wrong ho. After the whole castle thing, we took a long bus ride to Universal Studios Japan.
I have to state a FACT. There was PEOPLE everywhere. Like I can't even walk into some shops as it was filled with people to the BRIM. The tour guide did warn us that Japanese LOVE to queue, like us Singaporeans, but it was ridiculously crowed. I guess we only managed to played 2 rides(ONLY 2?! That's crazy). The first was JAWS, and it was really unexpected and frightening, like I'm experiencing the real thing omg. Highly recommended.
WE entered the Hogwarts area, after we printed our 'booking time'. And it was so VERY peaked with humans. We have to squeeze our way through the crowd, even though there were a lot of them leaving, but I guess twice the amount is coming in. The booking time slot thingy didn't help in managing the crowd, at all.
However, still, the way they designed the place really fits the theme! (Duh) They have the movie music played everywhere, such atmosphere heheeeh.
Argh girl, you destroyed my photo.
OMG THE hogwarts castle!! I was enthralled.
Hagret's Abode!! Along the queue we spotted Buckbeak as well!
That was taken when we are queuing up for the second attraction. It was a short roller coaster ride and the waiting time was approximately 45 mins. It was crazy. Nonetheless, I was underestimating it as there wasn't any sharp drops, or loops. And I'm a person who prefer thrilling ride over slow ones, and I prefer not queuing to anything. Wait, back to the main point, so I thought 'pft this is gonna be a boring ride', and I guess, overall, it's fun! Though it lasted for a minute or less. I remembered a drop that was exhilarating, and I guess that was worth the queue ahah.
We bought a root beer thingy, again there was a long queue, but we get to keep the cup! We saw tons of people holding it around the place, but this was the area where they actually bought it. Needless to say, we bought it as a souvenir and a refreshment after the long wait and short ride. We also can't enter the souvenir shop due to... well I emphasized the reason enough.
For dinner, we went to this sushi restaurant right outside our hotel!
Oh for the record, our hotel was really near USJ and there was a street of shops connecting it from our hotel to the amusement park! We had ton of choices of restaurant to eat from, but we chose the sushi one as the tour guide recommended it. I guess we really trusted our tour-guide.
Turns out, it was pretty ordinary. The sushi was topped with raw shashimi, the really regular type, and that was it. I guess we were spoiled by the amount of choices of sushi in Singapore, like sushi topped with beautifully designed fried crab, fried prawn, crabmeat and more. Add on, if we didn't feel like eating sushi, we can choose from bento to ramen to udon, in Singapore that is. So I was expecting more in Japan! Guess the place that sushi originated from remains traditional without any other modification. In the end, I like the ones we had in sg more lol.
Turning in for the night, we retrieved our luggage and headed up. We happened to be the last in the group to return to our hotel as our luggage was the only ones left lol.