Saturday, May 20, 2006

umeda

Today, after my lesson, I met Satoshi in Umeda. Umeda is about 20 minutes by train from our place, Ishibashi. After waiting about an hour for a table, we had lunch at a buffet. It was supposed to be an Okinawan type buffet, but I was a bit disappointed with the kinds of foods that were served. Satoshi on the other hand, ate 3 servings.

After lunch, we went to a little shop called, Kokoroniamai Anpanya. This shop sells all kinds of anpan. Anpan are sweet bean paste covered with a sweet bread type dough, then baked. This shop had some unique anpan.

One was the kinakomochi anpan a whole kinako (powdered soy bean) mochi (rice cake) enveloped in the sweet bread dough.

Another one was the sakusaku anpan. Sakusaku is the onomatoepoetic sound for crispiness. The inside is the sweet bean paste, but the outside was a flaky crust. This one reminded me of the pie crust manju that we have in Hawaii.

Some of you have asked me how crowded Osaka is...here are some photos of a "mild" crowd, I've been in worse crowds.

After our late lunch and anpan shopping, we walked around Umeda a bit then got on the train to go to the end of our line--Takarazuka. They have a park where dogs can have their owners pay admission, so that they (the dogs) can run around. They call this park a "dog run park" (pretty obvious, yeah?) We were amazed at how big this poodle was!

Kokoroniamai Anpanya
9-24 Kakuda-cho (located in the Shinumedashokudogai)
Kita-ku, Osaka
Phone: 06-6312-9790

4 comments:

Piccola said...

Oh! It's really nice that there are dog runs in japan too. Locally, we have dog runs too, entrance is free, provided our dog has passed their attitude test. Just to see if our dog can obey our command, in case of any emergencies.

Giant poodles :) It's really huge compared to the minature and standard sized poodles.

K and S said...

Hi Piccola,

I don't have a dog, so I didn't realize that, that was what they were called. It's great that they are free where you are, do they dog runs in your area have grass too? The ones here do not, in fact, most of the "people" parks don't have grass either.

Thanks for stopping by!

Kat

Anonymous said...

Hi Kat!
I love the 'crowd' scenes... seems like Waikiki on a July 4th holiday.

Thanks for sharing such interesting tidbits of life..

K and S said...

You're welcome, Debi!

Kat