Our favorite stop this trip? Osaka, Japan.
Osaka is the perfect cruise ship port city. The cruise ship terminal, modern and well appointed, sits right next to the world’s largest marine aquarium and a giant ferris wheel. A long line of taxis awaits disembarking guests. The surrounding blocks host restaurants, retail stores, and even barber shops. And the clean, efficient metro station (which whisks riders to almost anywhere in the city) lies just a five-minute walk from the waterfront.
Only the infirm and the very timid should sign up for the ship’s bus tours here, given the approachability of the city and its people. After breakfast on board, we set out for Osaka Castle, with its intimidating walls built of ridiculously massive stones and its eight-story central tower. The view from the top rewards those who climb the flights of steps to squeeze onto the narrow little open-air observation deck.
The museum inside showcases everything from elaborate and beautiful scrolls (letters, mostly, some detailing the troop death toll in elegant, fluid characters on gold-embossed paper) to walls depicting major battles (with tiny little faces so accurate, relatives were able to identify certain soldiers after the fact).
From there, we jumped into the metro and walked to Shitennoji Temple, Japan’s oldest Buddhist temple, burning incense and accepting offerings since about 600 AD. It sits in the middle of a Buddhist graveyard … right next door to an elementary school, where the kids who saw us coming shouted, “Americans! Americans!”
All this immersion in history made us hungry, so we grabbed a taxi to Shinsaibashi-suji, Osaka’s mile-long pedestrianized, covered shopping street. Before strolling, we asked Adam Parker, my good friend and travel planner, to recommend a great, off-the-beaten path local restaurant, and he sent us to Dotonbori Kurofune, well-known for their delicious grilled eel over rice.
If you’ve ever had those anemic, drowned in sticky sweet sauce slivers of eel they serve over small-town sushi — forget everything you know about eel. This was hot and meaty and succulent.
We walked Shinsaibashi Street an hour or two, browsing the Uniqlo flagship store and resisting sales on brightly colored sneakers before heading back to the ship for short rest.
And after running a little errand in the afternoon, we ended up on Dotonbori Street for tonight’s dinner and stroll.
Dotonbori is like the movie Bladerunner come to life, with bristling neon signs, restaurants buried under giant 3D versions of the food they sell, hundreds of stalls selling grilled beef and noodle bowls, and thousands of noisy, cheerful locals and tourists enjoying the night air.
We started with dinner at Kani Doraku, famous for the giant crab perched on the restaurant’s exterior wall.
Wow: we ordered the smallest set dinner (we’re on Zepbound, you know) and still got steamed crab legs, crab sashimi (raw crab), crab soup, crab dumplings, crab tempura, and crab sushi … plus dessert. After that, we staggered around the street, dazzled by the atmosphere.
And then: back to the ship. This was our favorite day of the entire trip: 11 hours of just walking the city, enjoying the sights, and being together in the kinds of places we just don’t get to see much of back home. In short: days like these are why we love to travel.
