Welcome back to another day in Osaka,
Japan. WOW. It feels amazing to be able to say that. Welcome to Japan!
We are at Osaka Castle. This is probably one of the best known landmarks here in Osaka,
and seeing it in person is even more amazing than seeing it like on our TVs or in photos. I am super
curious to see what it looks like on the inside, so that is the goal for today. We're heading
to the Castle, then we're going to hit a nearby History Museum, and of course we're
going to try some more Japanese food later on. I still don't understand what I'm eating.
Osaka Castle was built under the Samurai and feudal Lord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He envisioned
a formidable, impressive castle that would unify Japan and it was the largest Castle when it was
built in the late 1500s. Unfortunately Hideyoshi died a year after the Castle's completion.
After being rebuilt several times over the years, the castle today
serves as a landmark for Osaka and is a very informative Museum about Hideyoshi's life.
Well, that was really interesting. It was not at all what I expected, so in case you didn't know,
the temple [castle] has been reconstructed a number of times throughout the years,
and the current construction that you can see behind me is 91 years old, which is the longest
time that this particular tower has stood. It's come apart that many times from fire, from war.
It's been rebuilt. It currently houses a museum which is super informative about the creator of
this particular Tower, and sort of how he tried to unite Japan back several hundred years ago,
so it was really informative. Really interesting. There were tons of kids there on field trips which
was a lot of fun to watch them. They all wear matching hats to make sure that their classes
stay together. It was really cute! After we were done going through the castle, we just
had a little Coke break on a bench, and a guy came up and talked with us for the longest time. He was
so sweet, but now we only have a short amount of time at the Museum, but we're still going to make
the best of it. We're still going to go and see what we can learn. Most of the pictures you
see of the thing are just of the main tower, but there's a lot more to see here. In fact, there's
an entire park that is around the Fortress. It's just massive! There's actually these huge moats.
There's not just one; there's two of them, and behind me is the largest stone wall in all of
Japan and it's 32 meters high. This place wins for one of the prettiest entrances and outer walls
that we've seen. This is beautiful, and I love all the trees, how they're sort of stacked.
What a beautiful setting!
We wanted to learn more about the history of this amazing city,
so we're going to check out the Osaka Museum of History. It's right behind me.
The art here is absolutely beautiful. I love, like,
the illustrations. It's so cool! I could spend hours looking at this.
This museum was fantastic. It takes you through just a couple thousand years
of Osaka's history and it ends sort of in the 1930s or so, during the Age of Greater
Osaka. They've created these street scenes with sounds that make you feel like you
are part of the Age of Greater Osaka, and it was really cool to walk through that,
and that was both of our favorite sections. This museum is not very expensive to get into,
and it's an easy recommendation if you come to Osaka. Learn more about the history!
I think that's enough culture for the moment. We're going to go do
something a little different. So, uh, so where are we going? What are we doing?
We're going to Don Quijote! Isn't that a book? What is it? It's supposed to be an
amazing department store, the likes of which we've never seen before, but we're about to find out.
This translates to "Surprisingly cheap Hall of Fame: Don Quijote."
That place is a real trip. Found a couple things that we needed,
and so, mission accomplished, and now we've seen
Don Quijote. That was really a lot. There was a lot going on in there.
It kind of fell apart when she was scooping it,
so it's now reconstructed Okonomiyaki. Yeah, all right, here it goes.
That's so good. It's like this whole world of flavors. Yeah, that is really good.
I still don't understand what it is. It's really good. We just finished our first okonomiyaki,
which I'm probably saying wrong, but it was delicious. We had it at a tiny little restaurant
with about four tables that was incredibly loud, so let me tell you now about what we had.
Okonomiyaki! We thought we knew what it was, but we were wrong. We thought it would be
more like an eggy pancake, but instead it was more of a lightly scrambled egg with
all sorts of goodies in it. We had a mixed one that had seafood and pork on it,
and it was topped with a sauce that was a little bit sweet, a little bit savory,
not spicy at all. It was absolutely delicious! That's really good. It was so much richer than
we expected. I was glad that we only ordered one. Bill saw the size of them when they were being
cooked. Thankfully we only got one. We got a side of noodles which also were absolutely delicious.
The noodles were really, really, really, really, really good. The noodles were a
garlic soy sauce and they were fantastic. I'm really happy with our meal and now we can say
we've tried another one of Japan's specialties! Thank you so much for watching. We ran out of
steam. We've had a couple pretty intense days. Sorry for the short video, but if you want more,
if you like videos about palaces and food, we've got one for you. Check out this video that we
just filmed this last summer in Brussels. You might like their mussels. We sure did!