Osaka, Japan - July 2000

Richard Seibert

Just checking in from a great trip to Osaka. The city of Osaka is about 4 - 5 hours away by car. On base, we can rent cars/vans or rv's and the rental includes free toll passes. The toll fees are the most expensive part of travelling in Japan by car.

Anyway, with Alisa in Australia until Aug 15th, Nick, Allie and I went on a trip to Osaka for a fun adventure. Originally, we planned a camping trip on an island on the Japan Sea. But do to a tropical cyclone warning, we decided to go city intead.

We arrived at Osaka around 12:00 noon on Saturday. We checked into our hotel. The Hotel Seagull, every room has a view of the Osaka Bay. We then went straight into the Osaka Aquarium (Kaiyukan). This is an incredible facility. It is entitiled "the ring of fire" as it highlights various marine environments found around a belt of volcanic activity around the Pacific. Some of the exhibits were the Aleutian Islands, Coast of Chile, and of course Monterey Bay.

The highlight of the visit was the giant whale shark. It is HUGE! and we got to see it during the feeding.

After the aquarium, we went on a ride on the World's Largest Ferris Wheele (it took about 20 minutes to go all the way around) IT was night time and you could see all around Osaka Bay.

The next day we went to the Suntory Art Museum. They happened to have a visiting exhibit entitled "Snoopy in Museum" with Snoopy stuffed dolls that were wearing different outfits from designers around the world (Even LLBEAN had a designer snoopy). It was like its a small world, only with snoopy. There was also artwork by Tom Everhart, he paints "peanuts characters with his feet, hands and other objects (yes brushes) but sometimes shoe horns. And we saw a IMAX movie entitled T—REX (see picture)

Anyway - we had a great time and got to miss the whole storm here in southern Japan.