Our fling with (Dotonburi) Osaka was short and not-so-sweet. We got there around 5 p.m., and spent a significant part of the evening frantically Googling for pharmacies, only to find that proper pharmacies were mostly in office buildings, close at 6 and only give prescription medicine if you have a proper prescription, and none of the drug stores which are otherwise famous for their skin care offerings had the ointment I was looking for. It didn’t help that no one could understand what a “cold sore” is, they kept offering me moisturizer.

It was very hard for me to relax and have a good time with the budding cold-sore I had on my nose, especially as we were just starting the trip and I was worrying myself sick over how much it could blow up in the absence of proper medication, but we decided to explore Dotonbori nonetheless.

Truth be told, it was quite anticlimactic. It felt like the Vegas of Japan of sorts, but I actually felt that I enjoyed experiencing it more through the YouTube vlogs than I did in person. Most of the famed kiosks were grossly overrated (and overpriced), and some of the best food we had in Dotonburi was actually way off the beaten path, far from where all the hype was.

A common sight all over Tokyo and Osaka both are drug stores, but for some reason, the large number of people walking around with large clear bags containing skin-care products, and the sense of urgency they had about them to get into the drug stores despite the long queues at the cashier made me want a slice of the pie right away. So, it was in Osaka that I bought my first lot of Japanese skincare (that is if I don’t count the under-eye masks and Suisan face wash powder I got from the Tokyo station on our way to Osaka), and you can read all about it here.

We walked around, tried some of the famous king crab legs, a couple of plates of takoyaki, and what turned out to be one of M’s most favorite discoveries of the trip: purin. It’s a creamy, silky custard of sorts made with Hokkaido milk. The shop is called “Japanese Sweets Champion Matari Purin”

We also saw some kids dressed as superheroes, picking trash of the streets, how adorable.

The next morning, we planned a day trip to Wazuka, but that didn’t quite happen because just as we left our AirBnB and were walking own the street, an earthquake struck, and it wasn’t a routine earthquake, because we heard sirens going on, buildings being evacuated, and I was completely petrified. It felt like a giant wave passed under me, and the buildings rumbled all around us.

Because the train service had stopped and we couldn’t get a concrete answer on when it would resume, we decided to just walk around and explore on foot because even the Ubers were barely available and only on super surge prices. Regardless, taxis and Ubers are super expensive in Japan anyway.

We got to see a very different side of Osaka. It looked so empty and quiet. We headed to Dotonbori anyway, and had several plates of takoyaki, enjoyed the clear blue skies, and saw that Namba shopping district was still pretty crowded!

The silver lining was that  we found a massive UniQlo store there, where M finally found the track pants he had been searching for all over, the exact same ones he bought from the Uniqlo in Bangkok the previous year. Ladies and gentlemen, he has 14 of the exact same track pants. It is his uniform.

I kept Googling the status of the train service to see if it had resumed, and I landed on an article suggesting that the current earthquake was too shallow and may have disturbed the deeper fault lines, which could potentially lead to a bigger earthquake. This one was 5.9-6.1 on the seismic scale. I knew that any bigger  would have been catastrophic and I just desperately wanted to leave Osaka.

Sadly, the Shinkansen train and the airport were both shut off, and we were therefore unable to leave. I felt completely trapped. The next morning, we check3d out earlier and left for Kyoto (which, ironically was even closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, haha!)

So there you have it. We didn’t enjoy our time in Osaka. The sense of impending doom just kept looming over me. Thankfully enough, despite 3 days of mild aftershocks, there was no big catastrophe.

As I go through these pictures though, I realize how much fun Osaka could’ve been, in terms of shopping some of the funkiest and more “Japanese” merch, had we not been so distracted with medicine hunt and had we known that our first night in Dotonbori would actually have been our only real one, we would have tried to make the most of it!