We planned to get up early this morning to go and see the tuna auction at the fish market.

I was having some blog technical issues last night so Brigitte had fallen asleep and luckily I googled the time of the tuna auction – it started at 4am, 😱

I therefore made a management decision and decided to secretly change the alarm clock for a lie-in. Good plan.

After a nice ‘western’ breakfast, we took the tube across town to the Osaka Aquarium which is quite spectacular. I could bore you with pictures and videos of whale sharks, hammerheads, sunfish, rays, penguins, seals etc etc but I’m sure you’ve seen them before so just one video for you.

I got lucky and saw this jellyfish as the light caught it perfectly. A minute later it swam away from the light and when Brigitte arrived at the tank she didn’t know why I was staring at a dull jellyfish – until she saw this video…

I swear I heard a lot of lip-smacking from the Japanese as they viewed the tanks. To them the sea is just a huge cold store and they visit the aquarium because it is food porn to them. Or that’s my thinking anyway.

It is an amazing place and I have no idea how they built such a huge sea aquarium six floors high.

The aquarium is constructed from acrylic glass panels up to 30cm thick.There are 103 of them weighing 314 tons in total, which is 1.5 times the worlds total output of acrylic glass!

After the fish, we rushed across town as I had had a timing accident and we had a river boat to catch.

We literally sprinted up escalators, across bridges and onto the boat with exactly one minute to spare. Phew.

We were then told we couldn’t board as we didn’t have tickets🤬 The confirmation email was entirely in Japanese so how was I supposed to know you had to collect them first?

Another sprint to the ticket office, a bit of queue jumping, a sprint back, and we were on the boat, sweaty and wet. 26 degrees today.

We shouldn’t have bothered as the cruise was extremely boring. The worst thing we have done in Japan. The only highlight was the guide’s terrible pronunciation. It took ten minutes before we noticed she was actually speaking English and we spent the rest of the cruise trying to work out what she was saying.

I know it may sound racist (and it probably is, sorry) but at one point she actually said. “ The eria around Ryan bridge was frudded in ninenteen firty-free. It is called Ryan bridge because it has a feece Ryan guarding each of its four corners”. Oh yes she did!!

If you’re ever in Osaka, give the river boat a miss, unless you like to see bridges from underneath and need a bad view of the castle.

Osaka is all about food and shopping. They are the two main pastime of the locals and you can tell by the hundreds upon hundreds of stores and restaurants.

In order to ensure uninterrupted shopping they constructing the longest shopping arcades in the world. This one is 4.5 Km long and another nearby is 5.3!

Kit kats here are a mystery to me. Invented by Rowntree in York, they are a huge hit in Japan and, since Nestlés takeover of Rowntree, they have become the top selling chocolate bar in Japan!

There have been more than 300 limited-edition seasonal and regional flavors produced, many exclusive to the country and not produced elsewhere. Go figure – it’s one of my favourites as well but I can only think of milk, plain and Orange and that’s it.

As it was our last night in Osaka we went out to a nice restaurant.

It was a tempura tasting menu and the only reason I’m telling you this is because the third course was fugu!! This is the puffer fish I mentioned yesterday that can only be served by a licensed chef because if it’s not prepared right and you eat the wrong part then you die.

We had our own chef, he seemed pleasant, it’s an hour since we ate. We are still alive.

If this is the last blog you receive then at least you’ll know what happened.

21:35 – 16th May – Cross hotel – Osaka