#3 - Umeda Sky Building

Today I was invited out into Umeda (big kind of city area with lots of shops etc) to go to do things and go to the sky building, so I went as I've been wanting to take pictures from the top for a while.

After train ride to Umeda, our first stop was the Pokemon Center. I have already been a few days before but the people I was with hadn't so we went again. It' still cool :) I bought a little figure of a Vaporeon and one of a Marshtomp (my favourite!) (Yes, I am a little nerdy). The Pokemon Center is basically a largish shop selling pokemon merchandise like toys, the computer games, note pads, t-shirts, cards...basically anything to do with pokemon, but mostly it was to do with the newer pokemon versions.

After that we tried to find the Sky Building but we didn't have a clue where it was so we walked around for quite a while until we were distracted by an arcade where we had to go in and play. An hour or so later we decided we should actually go to find the building so went off in search again. By this time it was dark so I was taking some cool pictures with my camera of random views and buidlings, which look quite good.

After a long and boring walk to the building I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a German Christmas Market being held underneath it! So naturally we had to buy some food and have a quick look at the stalls. It was fun and I heard quite a bit of German spoken in the background.

Figuring out how to get to the top of the Sky Building was hard. There were various escalators and elevators and basically we took the wrong ones, as they went nowhere near the top. Eventually we got on the elevator, which was made of glass so you can see everything going up, followed by revelations of a friend who now decided to say he was slightly afraid of heights. I know it's not really funny, but it was! He got comfortable fairly soon at the top though so it's all good.

The weather is a little smoggy so we couldn't see that far, but the view was great! You can see all the lights of the shops and restaurants, the lit up bridges across the water and even the top of Osaka Castle all lit up far far away. It was great. The floor at the top was also speckled with flourescent paint, and there are blue lights around, so it looks like a colourful starry floor.

After leaving that and the German Christmas Market we decided to go get something to eat, finally going into one place. My 2 friends had shabu shabu (I can only describe as cookign your own meat in boiling water) while I decided to try the ikateriyaki - squid. Being a little aprehensive at first, I soon discovered that it was actually quite tasty!