Yasmin Everley's Designs: Fish, Maids and more Cats

And now my final post about Japan, until I go back! (Hopefully)

"Press to play back flushing sounds to muffle toilet sound (25 seconds)"

I love Japanese toilets and I shall miss them.

I look forward to seeing all of Rowan's picture...

The Gift Shop.

Osaka's giant Ferris Wheel.

We decided that we ought to do SOME proper sightseeing and since Osaka's Aquarium is meant to be one of the best we went there...

Osaka Aquarium

I think that quite a few aquariums have a tunnel through the water but I love them and wish there had been a bit more of that! Overall the layout of the place was really good; you go up a long escalator to the top of the building and then spiral your way down through the tanks. This means that with some of the very tall tanks you start above the water and slowly reach the sand at the bottom. This was especially interesting in the sea lion and dolphin enclosures were you can watch them dive into the water and then twist and turn at the bottom.

The Tunnel of Fish

We had really good timing and arrived at most of the enclosures just in time for a demonstration or feeding. The Capybara were pretty cool, apparently the biggest rodents in the world, strange animals. I think it would be fun to have some of these on the lawn instead of rabbits if you had a big enough house!

Capybara!

Penguins

Dolphins

Shark!

The sea lions were so lovely, we saw a demonstration with them doing some of the usual tricks but when we came down to the underwater window we were the only people there and they were following us around the glass, twirling about if we waved our hands! Obviously they are trained to behave like that but it was really lovely to be so close to them and have some kind of interaction.

Sea lion friends!

We returned to the dolphin enclosure for feeding time. This particular girl was very brave in my opinion as the two other dolphins went zooming around her and leaping over her at pretty awesome speeds. Dolphins are impressive of course, but I can see where the sharks are coming from in Finding Nemo...

Return to the dolphins

Jellyfish. I would HATE to be anywhere near any of these without a thick sheet of glass in between but I have to admit that they are fascinating to look at, far more like curls of smoke than a living creature.

We were about to leave when we spotted the petting area.... I think it was probably aimed at children but I really enjoyed it! You could only pet the baby sharks and rays and then there were lots of little tanks at a child's eye-level with the prettiest little fish. And seahorses. Seahorses are so strange looking with their ridges and almost spikey heads. They sort of remind me of the crowns of the princesses drawn by Kay Nielsen .

Next to the aquarium was a slightly grim mall. Inside the mall was a very strange, rather sad petting zoo. There were some goats and birds and then a sign advertising cats, dogs, monkeys, bunnies and miniature pigs if you pay to go in. I always want to see cats and I've seen lots of pictures of micro-pigs and I was quite excited to see them so we went in. They were guinea pigs. Damn.

Favourite

Apart from being inside a mall, this is also way this petting zoo was a bit sad. It was essentially run like a brothel.

Also this poor ugly creature lived here.

Another vending machine adventure:

Hot lemonade? sounds interesting...

a bit tricky to open...

oh my goodness that is DISGUSTING

We spent quite a lot of time in the Shinsaibashi area. Far more than Rowan was happy with but it was my favorite place to see all the people our age and some of the fashion. Not as out there as Tokyo but quite a long way from home!

Favourite shop, mix of vintage and young designers.

Second favorite shop; Lotita, maids and uniforms!

Sushi! We ate quite a lot of sushi in conveyor belt restaurants where it was about 130 yen per plate (each plate had two pieces). Sadly we were not allowed to take photos (as you can see in my picture) so I had to be sneaky. I miss these places so much already! Last night we realized we had no food in the house and ended up ordering Japanese takeaway and obviously it was NOT THE SAME. Here you can see the beer, the hot water tap and box of teabags for free green tea, soy and some other kind of sauce and a box of delicious pickled ginger!

YUM!

On our way home one evening we stumbled across a strange café which was playing American sport and playing jazz. The whole place had a strange perhaps 30s American atmosphere and it was run by a a very serious man who made all the drinks the old fashioned way. (He whipped the cream for my hot chocolate himself, nothing in a can for him!)

Hot chocolate

Cheesecake

We really missed cheese and may have slipped up and gone to a café selling cheesey sandwiches on our way to DenDen Town.

There we saw a wide variety of maid outfits; some verging on slutty, others the complete opposite.

Old fashioned maid.

We had definitely wanted to go to a maids café but once we were there we became very shy about going in so when we saw this one on the corner we just shuffled in quickly before we could chicken out. No pictures inside so I will tell you a bit about it. Our first problem was that we couldn't speak Japanese. If you want to go to a maid café, definitely try to find someone who speaks the language!!! This meant that the maid that served us couldn't act out her character as fully as she want to and she seemed to be a bit upset about not knowing enough English! Apparently the maids usually use rather archaic courtly language and the idea is that you can envelop yourself in the fantasy that you are a lord returning to his manor. I am uncertain about how sexual this is. Our maid was wearing quite a long skirt and had long floppy rabbit ears and long arm-warmers. Rowan was very distracted by the fact that her teeth were pretty bad. We were both very awkward about having to ring a little bell to summon her to our table when we wanted to order. Overall it was an interesting but I really don't think we had the full experience because of the language barrier and our own self-consciousness.

Then we had a look in some manga stores. I would like to go to an English version of this since I enjoyed the ones we read at the Manga Museum. A lot of these had quite explicit covers and then I noticed that I was the only girl there and.... we left quite quickly.

The shops selling action figures were insane. Absolutely crammed with so much STUFF. I didn't know what most of the characters were but I recognized some Sailor Moon ones here! I bought a little keyring of a maid as a souvenir. Some of the figures were more than a bit weird. It made us wonder what the laws are about cartoon kiddy porn. Enough said on that.