New years in Osaka!

After leaving Hiroshima, I went to Osaka to visit my grandparents and cousins to spend new years with them.

New years in Japan is very important as the first three days after countdown is for family. 

People stay at home and eat, play games, and visit temples :)

So that's what I did this year!

I first visited the Fushimi Inari Temple in Kyoto.

This temple is known for the amount of Torii.

My couin in the middle of the Torii.

And we climbed up this temple/mountain at night so I got to take a really nice night scape of kyoto and osaka. 

On new years we ate osechi which is a tradtional meal we eat in new years.

Each food has meanings, such as "Long life" "Having healthy kids".

My grandma made half of the osechi and ordered the other at a restaurant.

Too much food for everyone.

And after hanging out at the park with my cousins

I went to my other grandparents place to eat more food.

I visited the closest shrine from my grandparents place.

And ate more osechi after coming back.

Wahh! Really food overload, I can't take it!

And cake!

And marinated octopus.

Cake!

Fried oyster!

Dumplings and hot pot!

More snacks that my cousin brought from home-

And snacks I brought from Hiroshima to eat!

Yum yum almond taste.

Sukiyaki for lunch!

Steak and salad for dinner!

Melon and prosciutto. Apparently an ultimate combination in Japanese standards.

I also went and ate out sometimes :)

Dessert I ate at the all you can eat.

After eating all this I gained 10 pounds in a week.

Boo- What happened to all the loosing weight.

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So yes, you know that I ate during my winter break.
But what else did I do?

I went to many places.

Some of the places includes this
"Cup Noodle Museum" in Osaka Ikeda city.

So the museum first started out with the history of how the cup noodle was made.

It was indeed made in Osaka and was loved by all Japanese citizens!

This is all the noodles made by Nissin.

Cute way of organizing the packages.

Cup Noodle voted as the number one invention made by Japanese people.

And then the main part of the museum is that you get to make your own noodle!

You first buy ur cup in this vending machine.

Tuduh! My cup!

And then we sanitize our hands.

We then get to sit

to decorate our cups with markers!

This is our cup noodle container that we decorated!

And then we line up here to make the inside of our cup noodle.

The conveyor belt of noodles

And we get to pick the soup base and what to put in our cup noodle.

Yum yum so many flavours!

We then recieve this plastic bag 

and we blow it up and put our cup noodle in it!

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Other things I did was play games

like monopoly

and this running away from men in black board games.

while drinking coffee from this very convenient coffe packages. 

Brilliant! Isn't it?

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I also went to the arashi concert.

Not to go watch them unfortunately but went and bought some goods!

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But at the end, the majority of the time I spend eating... lol

I went to a very famous ramen place called Ippudo.

This is the menu.

You can choose if u want very hard noodles or soft noodles.

The table with lots of condiments that you can use with ur noodles. 

And this is my spicccy spiccy noodle.

You can choose from levels 1.3.5.7. and very hot and too hot.

I chose the ultimate "too hot" and died.

Never choose this level as u cannot enjoy ur noodles lol

And then we ate some dessert.

Cute bakery.

And this is my cream puff. Ah~ I love custard cream puffs!!

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Other things I did was played in game centres.

I almost played on this game machine but thought it was morally wrong so I never got to see how it works.

Also played with darts.

Dart games.

And because ppl smoke inside buildings in Japan, they have these machines that sucks up the bad air and makes it good.. I think.. maybe... Does this thing really work?

I also tried on some kimono!

Will write another post on this soon~

And then on the 5th I took a 6 hour bus ride back to Tokyo.

Tokyo and Osaka seems close if you think of it but to me its a complete different place.

At the end Osaka feels more like home but I was happy to be back in Tokyo as I have more friends here :)

Sorry for the very unorganized blog post. 

Obviously it would've been better if I actually wrote everyday...

Will do from now on!