Day 9 - Transit to Osaka

Travel to Osaka was a short Shinkansen hop from Hiroshima. The trip was made to feel longer by the accumulated exhaustion catching up to us after a week of ambitious tourism and lots of walking in not always gentle terrains. Our energy level results in not much tourism stuff and fewer pictures.

The Shinkansen route parallels the Sea of Japan, but much of the track is through tunnels in the coastal mountains [to safely travel at the speeds it goes, the Shinkansens rely on flat routes, so rather than going over the mountains, it generally goes through them].

Osaka is historically the major commercial city in Japan. It's a big city roughly equivalent to Chicago, but with out the stockyards. The city itself has few popular tourism site - Osaka Castle probably the most obvious; it is currently hosting the World Expo to give itself a boost. It is convenient to more visited places - Kyoto, Nara, Kobe are all about 30 minutes by train with more famous sites. For us, it was a rest stop where we would meet up with Marie' before jumping to Sapporo.

Osaka Castle Station with its story in the murals...

We were way early for checking into our AirBnB, though they did let us drop off our bags so we could wander. For us, the goal was just to find someplace we could hang out without much effort. Based on the limited knowledge of the city, we took a local train to the Osaka Castle Park, where we just sat a took a few pictures around us.

As with our visits to Fukuoka and Hiroshima, we were at the tail end of the Sakura Blossom season. The Castle Park, like many Japanese city parks, have lots of trees. The Daini Neya River is nicely framed by the late blooming trees.

The end-of-season blossoms create "pedal falls" likened to snow showers where kids and others get to play...

Finally waited long enough so we could go check-in to our flat, where we basically crashed after picking up some MREs from the local convenience store, joining many Japanese.

As usual, all the pictures from the day are in the Gallery, though there are not that many more for this post.