Tennoji Zoo and Tsutenkaku

We hadn’t visited Tennoji yet, but it is one of a major tourist destination with over the top restaurants and hang outs with lots of color and neon. In other words, it’s very Osaka. It’s just a few stops over on the Osaka Loop Line and also has a rather large zoo.

Tennoji Zoo

The Tennoji Zoo is a nice sized city zoo, but I liked that the animals didn’t feel overly cramped, at least in the Safari area. It’s obviously great for kids, and features some hippos, rhinos and giraffes. They also have a lot of monkeys, chimps and some Red Pandas too. The surreal part of the experience is that you can see the tallest building in Osaka which is called Abeno Harukas. We will explore that place another time, which has shopping and a hotel inside. It’s across the street from the Tennoji station and zoo.

Shinsekai Area

The name translates to “New World” which was given when the area was first developed in the early 1900s with a mixture of western culture and ‘modern’ design. There was an Eiffel Tower replica built at that time, but burned down and the current Tsutenkaku tower was built in it’s place in the 1950s. The tower and surrounding area feels more retro now, but is surrounded by flashy store fronts and restaurants.

The area is famous for having Kushi-Katsu restaurants which are basically Japanese pubs with fried foods on skewers. Of course, you can get a variety of meats and seafood, but also interesting things like horumon (innards), cheese, eggs, etc.

Beer and deep fried stuff, they also have other izakaya style foods too. It was a weekend, so drinking at lunch seems to be the norm around here.

We walked by this restaurant, which has a big old style fishing boat you can sit in. They also had fishing poles and fish swimming around the big tank, so I guess they let you catch your meal? Interesting.

The whole place is probably pretty exciting at night with the lit up neon store fronts and drunk folks.

Taiyaki

On the way home, after we sobered up we got a little hungry, so we found a Taiyaki place, which they have peppered around town. This one was near our station and we walk by it a lot, and it always smells pretty delicious. It’s basically a waffle like crust with different fillings, we decided to get one with sweetened red bean and another with sweet potato. They had some varieties with ice cream too, but the neat thing is the guy makes them fresh per order so you can watch him.

We got home and ate them while still warm!