It’s another rainy day and my photographs are sort of blurry. Ah well. I figured I’d take it easy today and I was looking for a nice, covered place to go. I knew I should get out of Umeda because it was going to get crowded. So I went to Tenjinbashisuji shopping street. I decided to start at the south end which was near Minamimorimachi. You have to walk a bit south to get to the end of the shopping street.

There’s a little more to the south, but it didn’t look like all that much more.

Back to the shopping street.

Of course, as soon as I got into the shopping street I saw people lining up somewhere to the east. I think it’s a rakugo theatre.

And just to the south of that is one of the entrances to Osaka Temmangū Shrine.

If you go all the way through the shrine, you can get to the main gate. Instead of warriors at the gate, there’s guys who look like tow of the seven lucky gods. I couldn’t get a picture because of the glare.

This is the main shrine.

And several to the side. The grounds are pretty large and there’s a parking lot on the grounds.

Here’s a blurry picture of a cow. I’m not sure what that’s about.

Lots of offerings of saké, though.

One of the first shops I saw on the way back in was a fabric store. This (fuzzy) picture is for my sister.

There were different colored gates down the shopping street.

And I swear there were a half-dozen massage places.

The lady bug mud signify the end of the gates.

There was a big intersection and the railway crossed through the shopping street. A young guy was walking his grandmother down the street. The sushi place had live fish in the tank.

Closer  to the north end of the shopping street things got narrower.

This was a side street I should have taken later in the day.

Compare the side entrance to the picture of the main entrance. I took a few days ago.

The shopping street does cross a few major streets. On each side there’s something over the entrance.

I thought I was going to have to look for the Osaka Museum of Housing and Living, but it was right at the northern end of the shopping street. You go in the building and go up to the eighth floor. You can see the shopping street out the window. (The weather got nice after I left the museum.)

It wasn’t raining inside, but the pictures are still fuzzy. There’s a rebuilt version of an Osaka neighborhood.

You can rent kimonos to walk around the “town” (just the two streets).

There’s a viewing area and then it’s down into the model. There’s an audio guide you can get of the town and the shops have things inside to look at.

This is a model of the old building methods.

The next area had dioramas of Osaka through the ages.

There’s a spoken word show if you wait long enough. An elderly woman talks about growing up before and after WWII.

 The dioramas drop down and a scene of the living space is shown. I didn’t take pictures of all of the dioramas, but it’s pretty interesting.

I decided to walk to Mos Burger, which is on the edge of Umeda. Turns out that taking the subway would’t have gained me all that much anyway, and the rain had stopped. I found this guy on the way back, next to the huge Korean Cultural building.

Lunch at Mos Burger.

I went back to the hotel and took a nap. I’m not sure I’ve recovered from it. I also decided to do something silly: eat at the old Mexican restaurant we used to go to. This cost me ¥1,880. The taco filling was entirely guacamole!

They were having some sort of contest that they like to do in Japan. You spin the thing and a marble comes out. I didn’t win anything there. But there’s a second-chance on the left side where you enter in a number into an iPad and I got a discount coupon for ¥300!

And that was my day. Tomorrow I tour the Suntory Yamazaki distillery.