Before I go into how my first morning & afternoon in Osaka went, I wanted to mention the hotel I was staying in because it was amazing, so happy I came across it when booking everything over a year ago.
Hotel She, Osaka is highly recommended if you ever get around to travelling to the city.
With that out of the way, let’s start the day off by heading out early in the morning aka 5am while it was still dark. I work in a bakery so I am used to waking up early so decided to use that to my advantage to see Osaka in a way that most tourists won’t see when there is no one else around.
I wanted to get to an area in the city called Dotonbori and I researched it would take around an hour to walk there and the weather was quite hot during the day so I decided the morning would be best.
Google maps on my phone helped me guide the way during the very cool morning through numerous small streets, bridges & long roads. I wanted to get to Dotonbori by the time the sun came out for the day and the rate I was walking, I knew I was going to get there on time.
After an hour, I finally arrived.
Oh boy, this is what I wanted and it was perfect.
Barely anyone around aside from some locals just as the sun was rising, I honestly couldn’t have time it any better even if it I tried.
This was the first time in quite awhile that I was left speechless as I wanted to see this place ever since I looked up things to do in Osaka over a year ago, what made it better I was really the only tourist to experience this morning.
I will always cherish this memory forever, heck it might come up in a story, not like I’ve got my first original story coming out soon and the third/final book from it will be inspired by this trip….
After this, I didn’t have much planned until the afternoon as I had an meal booked at the Final Fantasy XIV Eorzea Cafe and nothing really opened for another 4 hours, I decided to do something I wouldn’t really do at home and that was to pray at temple.
Stated this in the previous post but I am not a religious person but I owed my late grandparents so much especially for the experience they just gave me, that I thought it be rude not to plus I didn’t want to just take pictures of shrines and that was it, they are places of worship after all and I didn’t want to be an rude tourist.
So I spent the next few hours giving my respects & spare change to temples, it was a rather peaceful morning. I spent the time to reflect on my life so far, how things are progressing and desires for the future and it blessed me with beautiful skies in return.
I confess my first breakfast in Osaka was an McDonalds but only because it is minutes away from my next destination, Tsutenkaku Tower.
Like any big city, you can’t really do it all in one day so decided to use the towers observation deck to experience as much as I could from high above, I got to the tower just as it was about to open so I was the first person to go in for that day.
I was thankful they were a place to sit down at the very top of the tower with some free almond milk I got with my ticket. It was even better I got there at the start of the day before it got busy.
On my way back down to the ground I thought about what to do next, this was around midday and I confess I was knackered from all the walking I did that and managed to change the meal I booked at the Eorzea cafe from 4pm to 1pm so I could take my time travelling from Tsutenkaku Tower back to the now busy Dotonbori area.
Despite using maps on my phone, I did get confused on the way there but got to the Eorzea cafe just on time. This was something I have been looking forward to for over a year as I’m a huge Final Fantasy XIV player, to visit a Japan exclusive cafe with items inspired by the game was a must.
See the images above, the decor for the cafe was beautiful and I got a seat facing a very nice wall with a lot of the main characters in the online game. I was very hungry & thirsty, looking at the menu ahead of time online I ordered a lot of food & drink, each order gave you a random ffxiv coaster, so by the end I had a lot of free items.
Wait didn’t the title of the post say something about free cake?
Oh yes I won this from a lottery/game the cafe does every now and then for those are in at the time.
This was after I had a lot of food and drink, let’s say I didn’t eat it all, even though it looked very nice!
Before I headed back to the hotel, just by chance I came across another shrine and oh boy, this shrine was a hidden beauty, Hozenji Temple. Finding this at the end of the day just makes the day overall a 11 out of 10 without a shadow of a doubt.
Only thing that was on fault was the pictures I took, I set the white balance way too high so I had to wait until I got back from the trip to edit them to make them better but that was down to me and it was sorted out.
I got a great selection of items from Osaka, any items stand out to you?
I loved Osaka so much but it was time tomorrow to move onto my next destination, Kyoto!
But I will save that for the next post 🙂
Megan
Megan Leyman 
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