Osaka

The police headquarters
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8/8

We walk to Osaka Castle. On the way we pass the police headquarters. There's a plaque there saying as they were building the headquarters, they found the remains of an old castle there.

Osaka Castle, itself, has a huge moat. Very impressive. The walls are also made up of huge stones. We found a visitor's tour guide (volunteer retiree) to show us around. He had a binder w/pictures of how they put the huge rocks on boats and rigged up a system to drag them to the castle. Our tour got cut short when the kids got too hot and ran for the soda machine and snack bar. Coby learned to just fill his baseball cap up with water and douse it over his head!

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Tony filled up on takoyashi. This is an Osaka specialty. It's a fried ball of batter surrounding octopus bits. I thought it was a bit gross. Everyone else seemed to like them fine. The rest of us munched on musubi Mary Lou had made and brought along.

The Castle now houses a 5 floor museum. Most of it covers samurai history. The kids were most  interested in the history of Hideyoshi (the shogun who built the castle). They had tv screens and 3D movie pictures showing the history. That's probably the only thing that held the kids attention! He was kind of a mean guy, who in the end ordered the killing of his own family.

Some history museum
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After the Castle, we headed over to Universal Studios. We arrived after 3pm, which worked out because you could get a discount at that point. There was a Universal Studios walk w/shops and restaurants. There were really long lines for everything though. The wait times were around 40mins so we had to calculate what we really wanted to see in the time we had before closing. Tony and the older boys rode a roller coaster while the rest of us saw a pet show. The pet show was kind of a bust in my view point as it was all in Japanese. Yeah, what did I expect! But there was so much dialogue! Now we know how the Japanese tourist feel! We also went on ET, Back to the Future, Jaws, Spiderman (kind of like the indiana jones ride where they shake you around), and a kid snoopy roller coaster. The kids had a blast there. Coby said it was his favorite day.