November 14 - 18, 2019
To spice things up, we decided to fly into Osaka and take the train back to Tokyo. We also like Osaka and our friend Shin and his wife live there too. Lucky for us Shin was available to hang out all day and night on that Saturday. We headed to Banpaku, the Expo ‘70 Commemorative Park outside of Osaka. We posed for the standard photos in front of the famous Tower of the Sun and stopped by some playgrounds for Cody to cruise down some slides. To our surprise there was also a festival going on, the Lohas Festa, which features locally made food and products and also had live music and advocates for reducing waste and taking care of the environment.
Cody really enjoyed the hula dancing and the ice cream.
Afterwards Cody got tired on the train ride back and we feasted on sushi with Shin.
The following day, we headed to the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan. This was an awesome aquarium although as scuba divers it was a little saddening to see all the sea life in tanks. Not much different than seeing animals locked up in a zoo I guess.