Morning – Tsurumibashi Shopping Street

It was drizzling again this morning, and on and off over the day. I feel like just like Akihabara, it rains a fair amount when I’m in Osaka, and as a result I never really get to spend as much time around the city as I like since my trips to Osaka are already kind of like day trips tacked on to a larger trip elsewhere.

I went to fact check this.

Trip 1 Day 1 (half day): No rain (0-0.5)
Trip 1 Day 2: Rain (1-0.5)
Trip 1 Day 3 (half day): No rain, though rain nearby/possibly while away (1-1)
Trip 1 Day 4 (half day): No rain (1-1.5)
Trip 2 Day 1 (half day): No rain (1-2)
Trip 2 Day 2: Rain (2-2)
Trip 3 Day 1 (half day): Rain (2.5-2)
Trip 3 Day 2 (today): Rain (3.5-2)
Trip 3 Day 3 (tomorrow – half day): Supposedly rain (4-2)
Trip 3 Day 4 (day after tomorrow): ??

I suppose it’s that I always have had just one scheduled full day in Osaka on each trip so far, and it’s always raining on that one full day.

Anyway, breakfast was a bowl of instant noodles from yesterday:

The main bulk of lunch eventually was too, from this second stack of groceries bought from another nearby supermarket after I went out wandering in the late morning.

What can I say, I want to try out different kinds of Japanese instant noodles as well, not just street food and restaurant food.

In between the two meals, I went out for a walk in the nearby Tsurumibashi Shopping Street. It was a really long street — the street started in this picture yesterday:

Went on for ages, and then finally ended at another intersection.

But I noticed that it actually carried on on the other side of the intersection too, and that went on and on until this intersection:

And hey, there were more shops on the other side, although the shopping street had been renamed to Tsumori Shopping Street by that time. So away I went:

Finally, it ended at this fourth intersection:

It looked like there were even more shops past that, but at that poin Tsumori Shopping Street was an outdoor shopping street, so it was quickly turning into something else altogether. I turned around there and headed back toward my lodging, located right by the east entrance of the original Tsurumibashi Shopping Street.

Along the way, I came across quite a few interesting shops. Like this secondary supermarket called Tamade, which also had a ton of bicycles parked outside of it.

I bought the groceries in the picture near the start from there, for just a little over 1000 yen.

Because there were so many bicycles, obviously there had to be an unmarked bicycle shop:

And there was also a flower shop with a bunch of Disney plushies on display above it:

And this bakery, from which I bought some yakisoba bread:

And this other unmarked shop, which was basically just a garage sale, full of boxes of mixed goods.

A lot of the shops were closed, either due to the rain or due to (assuming they copied Jujo Shopping Street) Tuesday being a rest day for some, and I also noticed that a lot of food shops were concentrated around the east end of Tsurumibashi, or the second junction, the one that divided the Tsurumibashi and Tsumori Shopping Streets. There weren’t a whole bunch of food places outside of those. There were plenty of other odd shops too, and this felt more “independent” and “local” than even Jujo Shopping Street was. There was only one convenience store in the entire row, for example, a 7-Eleven right in the middle which I withdrew another 20,000 yen from (and learnt two things: one that I had to withdraw yen from it in multiples of 10,000 yen because that was the only bank note they had, and the other that my Scotiabank card was indeed better than the direct exchange rate at the kiosk — it cost me $182.50 and no service charge by charging it directly to my debit card in yen, and would have cost $186.09 if I had let the 7-Eleven automated banking machine do the conversion).

Another significant portion of the shops were clothes shops, selling clothes either in the 100-500 yen range or the 1,000-2,000 yen range. There were quite a few of them, sometimes virtually next to each other, and I spent time browsing through many of them but did not end up buying anything.

Also, although there were a ton of people on bicycles clogging up the path, there were also a small but surprisingly notable population going through on wheelchairs and walkers, I saw at least 10 of them, some travelling by themselves and others being pushed along by friends or loved ones. The general population of the shopping street, at least on a rainy Tuesday mid-morning that was also a school holiday, skewed older than other shopping streets that I had seen. It was a nice walk though, made nicer by the music that was playing over the loudspeakers, something that I remember from the other main Osakan shoutengai that I’ve been to as well, but not from most of the Tokyo or Kyoto ones that I’ve been to.