Little Lunch

First stop, the Instant Ramen Museum!

Peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat.

~Momofuku Ando, creator of instant ramen.

Chikin ramen was the first instant noodle, created by Momofuku Ando in 1958 and in 1971 began sales of the first Cup Noodles. The museum is a really interesting place to visit, particularly if you are a fan of instant noodles. You can learn about the origins of instant noodles, see a wall of every flavour ever sold and even decorate your own styrofoam cup which you can fill with instant noodles and your own choice of flavouring and toppings. It gets sealed and packaged ready for you to take home to eat.

Design your own noodle cup

Upstairs is also a kitchen where you can cook the noodles from scratch but we didn’t have time to do this.

After the ramen museum we were of course, very hungry. So I took the girls to Kuromon Market, a food market in Osaka, to eat some katsu curry. We went to a tiny little shop I found on my last trip, run by a husband and wife. Serena had the curry udon and I had a Pork Katsu curry. Tasty and nice and hot, perfect for the cold Osaka weather.

Pork Katsu Curry

We continued from there to Doguyasuji, a little kitchen supply street mainly for restaurants and catering. You can find everything here from plastic food to piggy shaped chocolate moulds to giant rice cookers and bread makers.

And somehow after this, even though we’d pigged out on curry, we decided we could stop for some sushi.

Raw prawn sushi

And then after that… some fried chicken.

Fried chicken with mayo.

Oh and I forgot about a couple of snacks we had before lunch. Some cheesecake slice we found at a gorgeous little bakery on the same street as the ramen museum.

And a hot pork and onion bun.

After lunch we spent the whole afternoon/evening shopping and making my feet sore and tired. After exhausting ourselves with the task of buying enough things to overfill our suitcases we headed back to Dotonbori to eat some crab.

We picked a big crab restaurant that still looked busy even though it was almost 9pm. It turned out to be a wise choice. Dinner was delicious, the highlights being the fried crab pieces, the boiled king crab and also the king crab sashimi.

Fried crab pieces

Then after dinner we stopped for takoyaki and yakisoba along Dotonbori. I didn’t realise how much food we ate until putting it all together here like this….

And then when we arrived back at our room we surprised Serena with a Totoro cake and bottle of Moet to celebrate her birthday. Here are the before and after photos. I also took a time-lapse video which I’ll have to edit and upload when I’m back in Australia. HAPPY BIRTHDAY DIRTY ALMOST THIRTY SERENA!

Totoro cake and Moet

No more Totoro...

Then time to sleep, tomorrow is a trip to Mt Koya!