Finally, we met up with Ruby! We made our way from Round One to America-Mura. It is a 10 minutes walk from Osaka-Namba Station. America-Mura is a shopping district that is popular amongst the youngsters. There are several second hand shops and record stores.
The clothes sold in the second-hand shops are relatively cheaper than those sold in department stores and major brands such as H&M and Uniqlo. The average price range starts from SGD $10 for non branded ones. There were many branded second hand items there which were really cheaper (half the original price) and were in good condition. However, design wise, many of them were not really want Singapore youngsters usually wear.
As someone who grew up in Singapore, seeing a record store was a relatively rare sight, not to mention visiting one physically. With the advent of technology, buying and collecting physical CDs has became less common. I doubt half of the people I interact with actually have a CD player that they still use at home though they may still have some old CDs lying somewhere in the storeroom. Ruby wanted to find some song tracks so we visited a few stores, one of which was KING KONG. As someone who grew up listening to songs from Youtube, I couldn’t really relate to any record collecting experience which was actually kind of sad. But nonetheless, it’s a nice experience to walk around a record store in Japan.
Afterwards, we went to eat ice-dogs as dessert. It’s made with deep fried hot dog bun with ice cream as filling. It had a unique taste and it served its purpose as a nice dessert.
We visited many clothing stores and they had many trendy clothes but were all pretty expensive (2000 yen and above). We saw a few 300yen shops that were similar to how Daiso works. It kind of shocked me how they even sell shirts and shorts for 300 yen. However I really doubt that the quality was good…
We passed by Alice on Wednesday. It’s a shop selling items related to Alice in the Wonderland and the entrance was really small and short, located at the end of the road. The items sold include accessories, bags, keychains, food and goodies, etc with relatively exquisite designs. The price for that quality and design was pretty alright. I bought a necklace for around SGD $12, inclusive of tax.
We also visited some manga shops. There were a wide variety of genres, from popular manga to those with mature content to doujinshi (fan drawn works). Nicole and I were getting bored so we took some nice photos in between shelves.
It’s finally dinner time and Ruby brought us to a Japanese restaurant with really good and okay priced food. I ordered a don with sashimi, salmon roe, a soft boiled egg and some seaweed. There was a choice between different toppings. I tried the soup of both Nicole’s and Jeremy’s ramen and both were quite favourful but I preferred Nicole’s more. Jeremy’s soup reminded me of Taiwan’s 沙茶酱 taste which was not bad but was a bit too much for me.
After dinner, we we went to some drug stores but decided that we should do the shopping on the last few days instead. To be honest, I was a bit agitated that evening as it was the first time we did not go according to plan. I wanted to shop for clothes but it near the closing time for most clothing stores so we had to give up on the plan for shopping before going to Kyoto and USJ. Luckily I actually bought some clothes beforehand and could wear those clothes instead. I actually was worried that I would not have the time to shop for clothes and items from the drug stores (I had tons of them to buy). Oh well, all turned out fine and maybe I should have not insisted on going to the drug store that night and ended up putting all items back in the end.
Some additional footages:
It’s the first night we bought alcohol and had a night session with Ruby. We bought some Suntory fruit beer and they were actually pretty nice! As someone who is rather hypersensitive to alcohol, I was pretty surprised that I managed to drink half a can and felt no intense headache. I can’t really recall what we talked about that night but I knew I had a great time.
Kansai Japan 