Jan 3 - Tokyo and ELLEN at last!
We left Nagoya at 11am and arrived in Tokyo at 1.45pm, with the bullet train journey feeling far quicker than 1.5 hours. We met ELLEN (^_^) at the station, had delicious cheap ramen and dumpling things in Ikebukuro, got the obligatory purikura from an arcade, headed back to the hostel for some catch-up time before Ellen headed home for dinner, and here I am writing this. Tomorrow we head to Kamakura for a day trip with one of Ellen's friends and will explore Shibuya in the night. It's not as cold as Osaka, despite some snow on the way up from Nagoya, so hopefully we'll be able to explore a bit more comfortably in the coming weeks as winter draws to an end.

Jan 2
We headed to Nagoya by shinkansen in the morning from Shin-Osaka, arrived at our hostel and traversed the steep stair case of death (Japanese stair cases are dangerously steep) with our luggage before heading out.

Basically all of our time in Nagoya consisted of shopping, as its castle and museums weren't all that appealing with everything else we've seen. Y1400 later we left an arcade, and then visited the Pokémon Centre (2 down, 3 to go) in the Oasis 21 building, a shopping centre built in 2002 that Stewart had visited before; it's built underground, with its roof towering above kind of like a UFO, with water streaming over glass in a roof-top rock garden that you could see the ice-skating rink in the shopping centre below from.

After trying out some pretty awesome cheap rice meals, kinda like the rival company to where we'd gone in Osaka, we headed to Book Off, picked up some second-hand CDs I'd been wanting for a while, and headed back to the hostel.

Jan 1
We finished off our last proper day in Osaka with the Bay Area and Aquarium, and although no snow came as forecast, the rain put a damper to the day. We headed for the Bay Area by the wrong transport system, and ended up on the opposite side of the harbour, before heading back via subway, hating the rain, bumming around in an arcade and then going into the aquarium itself.

The aquarium is gigantic (8 floors tall) and puts Sydney's pretty awesome aquarium to shame. You take an elevator from ground floor straight to the top, and gradually spiral downwards through each level, seeing a lot of the same tanks from different angles. The whale shark tank was incredible, with dramatic music to match, but I also loved the sea otter and seal tanks. A little girl stood at the bottom of the seal tank waving a metal toy around, and the seal followed her hand like a dog to a ball, which was kinda cool.

At night we had dinner at a cheap (and kinda dingy but the price was awesome) noodle bar before heading home early for the next day.