World Stories

For this blog, I will tell you about our time in Osaka. Osaka is a small town in Japan that didn’t have many tourists, so it was a very nice town to spend a long time in. We spent 3 weeks in Osaka and had a very wonderful time there.

Our 3 weeks in Osaka was one of my favorite parts about our trip. Osaka just had something about it that you can’t explain; it was quiet, peaceful, friendly, and magical in a way. The reason why it was magical was because you could take a nice morning walk and pass by the windows of a bakery with the aroma of fresh bread wafting out and people lining up to get a warm and soft baguette. You could pass by parks filled with blooming plum blossoms and kids throwing a ball to each other while running around and laughing with joy, and after your morning walk you would return to your small Japanese-style apartment with your arms piled with fresh breads and sweet fruit tarts and your cheeks tinted pink from the crisp autumn air.

One of our days in downtown Osaka, we went to the Osaka castle museum. For the rest of this blog, you have to understand that downtown Osaka was not the peaceful area of Osaka that we stayed in, and all of the events that I will be talking about for the rest of this blog are in downtown Osaka. The Osaka castle museum is a very large castle in a tall stone base surrounded by a wall and a moat. To get to the castle, you have to walk up a long winding path that will take you to the front. This giant, colorful, towering castle has the emperor’s garden surrounding it. This garden is filled with beautiful flowers and has a huge section dedicated to plum blossoms. These stunning plum blossoms are either white, white and red, or a bright pink. Inside the castle is an array of samurai armor, swords, and ancient paintings and writings. It was cool to see how many rare artifacts they had there.

Below the castle was a lot of gift shops but also a mini-figure exhibit. This mini-figure exhibit had a whole floor dedicated to mini-figures and models. What was super cool about it was that it had every thing you could possibly think of but in small plastic models. They had everything, from microscopic organisms to an eagle eating a fish. You also got a free metal coin with a dragon head on the front! One other cool thing about the mini-figure exhibit is that they set up detailed terrains were the dinosaur section was. The type of terrain (in glass cases) that they had was were there would be a T-Rex at the base of a tree, and small baby flying dinosaurs would be hiding in a hole just above the T-Rex’s head.

The last couple things, one of which was our walk through this town with hikes and temples. On our walk, one of the first things that we encountered was a small shop that sold fried maple leaves. Fried maple leaves are a Fall and early Autumn delicacy. To make this you have to find a-lot of maple leaves and then fry them in oil and leave them to sit on a pan overnight. It is a quite fascinating process that requires a-lot of time, effort, and skill. On the rest of our walk, we munched on a small bag of these (they might sound weird and gross, but they are actually very delicious).

After our walk around the town we walked a walking path up to the waterfall. On our way we stopped by an insectarium that had display habitats with alive and very cool bugs. At the back they also had a butterfly garden that we walked in quickly before we went to the waterfall.

At the waterfall, there was lots of vendors, one of who sold fish and ice-cream. We bought a (whole and not-gutted) fish from him and we got ice-cream. The ice-cream that I picked was blue-soda flavor, and surprisingly it was pretty good!

That is it for this blog. Sorry readers that I have not written a blog in a long time. I just got home a couple weeks ago, so it has been a busy few weeks and I totally forgot about blogging. I hope that you guys have enjoyed this blog and keep looking for new ones because now it is on my weekly schedule to work on a blog. I trust that everyone is in good health and good spirits, so farewell my dear readers. Until the next blog.

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In this blog I will talk about our adventures with two mysterious viewers from our audience. These peoples’ names are Lauren and Shelbie. Lauren and Shelbie (or Pippen and Sam) are two best friends who befriended my mom through a university trip, which she and another teacher (Garret) led a few years back. They found a common interest in travel and dope stuff and because of that they quickly formed a tight friendship. These 24 and 25 year old ladies met us on our epic adventure for two week that flew by in their presence. They are both very pleasant to have as traveling companions.

One of the examples of the claim that I just made is that one of the days in our two weeks with them they took me on a trip! On that trip, we went to a museum, my favorite pizzeria ( the 4 p’s pizzeria ), a certain street, and a pretty good pho place. The day started out as a rainy and cloudy day, so we decided why not have some morning pho. FYI , for any reader who didn’t know, here is a link to what pho is https://www.recipetineats.com/vietnamese-pho-recipe/ . In that link is a pretty good idea of what pho is. The pho at the place that we went to was pretty good. After that, we went to a Vietnamese Women’s History Museum/ Vietnam War Museum. The museum was pretty cool! After the first floor, Lauren decided that she was going to take the place of my Mom and started quizzing to make sure that I remembered/paid attention to everything. So after every area I got the dreaded quiz. It was still fun though. Once we got done with that, we went to the 4 p’s pizzeria! At the pizzeria we got half of a margarita pizza and half of my favorite, the all powerful 5 CHEESE PIZZA! The 5 cheese pizza has the following cheeses: Blue, Camembert, Parmesan, Brie, and Mozzarella.

After we ate that delicious meal, we walked around for a few. On this walk we saw all of these little go-cart type things that had 3 wheels! There were tons of these 3 wheelers on a section of the road where the cars were not allowed to go. How this 3 wheeler worked is that the front wheel is controlled by the gas and brake peddles and the back 2 are small wheels like the ones on a shopping cart, so those two wheels could go any which way (forward, back, and sideways). These little go-cart type things were really fun and uncontrollable. It was super easy to go crazy in the way that you try to drift but end up in an uncontrollable donut! They were super fun, and after 20 minutes on them, we started heading back.

After that city, we went to a city named Sa Pa up in the mountains. We stayed in the outskirts of Sa Pa, so it was more like a small village in the mountains. To get there we had to ride a super long bus, but it was worth it because I watched my first star trek movie and I totally loved it!( I loved it so much that it has become my new show, since they do not have Big Bang Theory on Netflix in Japan.) In that part of Sa Pa, we stayed at this hostel, but it was more like a cluster of cabins on very close by pieces of property. It sounds rough, but the cabins ad property are actually really nice. Every morning we went to the outside common gathering place to have breakfast, and for me, to play with the dogs. On the lower half of the hill there was a garden and a sand pit, and on the upper half, there was a restaurant/fire pit area. We went to this common place every day after we got done with our day trip and hung out there.

One epic thing we did in Sa Pa was a day hike that a local named Mimi led. The hike was pretty cool. The reason why it was so cool is because we went up in the mountains (it was actually pretty sunny) and crossed streams, looked upon the rice paddies below, and explored waterfalls! It was an amazing hike.

Another epic thing that we did in Sa Pa was this temple up in the clouds that was super cold but pretty sick looking back on it. This huge temple built into the side of the mountain was secluded from the city, so you have take a 30 minute ski-lift up to it. After you got into the building, you have to exit the delightful warmth and go into the harsh, cloudy, cold outside. Once you were outside, you had to climb up about 1,500 stone steps! We were not dressed for this frigid weather in the clouds so we got super cold. Plus, this was all outside and unsheltered, so you had to face the strong wind. After we got done with that, we rode down on the ski-lift and that was really cool because you could see the valley from up above.

The last thing that we did was Ha Long Bay. Sorry for carrying out this blog so long; there’s just a lot to say. Ha Long Bay is a beautiful bay with a maze of wonderful karsts in it. https://www.visithalongbay.com/insight-guides/halong-bay-geology-how-halong-formed.html

When we were on a boat in the karsts we did wonderful activities such as kayaking, squid fishing, swimming, partying, and chilling. The karsts were a wonderful experience, and I highly recommend it to anyone thinking about a vacation.

Thank you readers for reading through this long blog. I hope everyone is well, and have a good rest of your day. -SilaG

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