The friday was quite calm, we decided to take a quick nap before getting ourselves ready to hit the streets of Osaka. I woke up at some time in the night still wearing my clothes, lights on but was too tired to wake Ulf or myself up. We woke up around 10 the following day and decided it was time to check out Osaka.

Our first goal was to check out two department stores that was supposed to be the place where trendy young people spend their savings. We got there after checking out another department store belonging to Umeda station. It seems that subway or railway stations are a natural centre for commerce in Japan, it’s almost always stores like Tiffany’s and Gucci in direct connection to communication hubs.

We did some shopping (will probably put up a separate gallery for our shoppings when we have time ;)) and left for the two ‘Hep’ department stores. We checked through one of them, somewhere around 12 regular floors and then three additional ones for games, slot machines and other forms of entertainment. After that we thought that we should check out the Umeda Sky building which would be quite interesting architecture according to our usual source of knowledge, wikipedia.

After some corrections along the way there we found the building and it’s surrounding smaller park and plaza. The building was some project where Osaka tried to enhance the Kita district which was a bit run down compared to other parts. We actually spotted some graffitti here, quite nice but not on a building though. You can walk through long underground tunnels without seeing a tiny tag in all of Japan with the exceptions of some areas I guess but it’s very impressive and you could probably eat from the ground on most places in central cities.

The Umeda Sky building was really cool and it seemed like you could go on top it for a fee of 700 Yen. I always consider paying for riding elevators and checking out view quite a nuisance but it might be worth it. When we got there I guess worth it is quite a understatement. The view was awesome and we snapped loads of shots, but since I didn’t bring my tripod it was quite hard to get good pictures during sunset. We stayed and enjoyed the view till about 20 when we left for our hotel. This time we didn’t plan missing the Osaka nightlife.