Osaka, Japan

Our last stop in Japan is Osaka, population 2.7 million and the third largest city: 

I was really looking forward to finally doing some serious shopping as it's our last stop before coming home.

They say Osaka is a hub for electronics so we first went to Den Den Town, advertised just as good as Tokyo. It was a disappointment really other than a shop called BIC Camera which had 6 floors of really nice electronics of all kinds. But there are no bargains here. In fact, we're pretty sure Canadian prices are quite competitive, even taking into account the taxes.

Not to be totally discouraged, we ventured out to normal shopping. Osaka has incredible shopping both street level and underground. Above ground there are a lot of covered streets:

And underground it's almost a city in itself:

You can walk for 20 minutes underground and never see the same store (except Starbucks every 10 minutes). There has to be a thousand shops underground (think the Toronto Path and multiply by at least five times).

At first, the clothing looked really nice and different in a good way. But then we realized that Japanese people are very small in size and even large and extra large don't fit properly.

Next we tried the food stores. We strongly believe that no one cooks in Japan as there are hundreds of ready made food for sale:

There's also all kinds of food stores:

Unfortunately we weren't really successful here either as everything was in Japanese. The staff were always very friendly but understanding what was in the packaging wasn't possible.

I was looking so forward to doing some major shopping but it wasn't in the cards. I'm not totally discouraged yet- I'm convinced I can find at least an iPhone case that's different before we leave (a true shopaholic)!!