When I was in Japan, my friend brought me to the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan for a day and it was amazing!! We had planned to stay in the area for the whole day so it was very laid back. The aquarium itself is located a bit far from city centre, but there’s a bus that takes you straight there. I had taken the 60 bus, but the Chuo (Green) line has a direct stop to the aquarium as well.
The aquarium boasts one of the biggest tanks in Asia! There are also many exhibits that represent different areas of the world like the Tasman Sea and Monterey Bay. The aquarium starts off with categorized exhibits, but you slowly realize that they’ve built it so that when you reach the main tank, you are circling it and get to see almost all of the sea creatures inside. It took me about three hours (+/- some) to walk through all of it, but as a science nerd, it definitely wasn’t enough.
The main focus of this post is that the aquarium is located in an area where it’s connected to other “villages,” you could say, that are similar. There’s a LegoLand, Marketplace, cruise ships, and more! The Marketplace has an old-school food alley that is designed like 1960s Osaka. It’s extremely fun to walk through, especially after the aquarium.
The marketplace is specifically called Naniwa Kuishinbo Yokocho. You can stop for lunch or dinner there; they have things ranging from ice cream to udon to ramen sets. My friend and I settled for sukiyaki for lunch then udon and tamago gohan (egg on rice) for dinner. The restaurants are pretty average for pricing and the food is filling, so I do recommend doing a circle around it. There is a big food modern food court right outside of it as well.
The other place that was a hidden gem to us was that there was a petting zoo right above this food alley/market! It was pretty cheap (3-5 USD) per person. The place didn’t seem too big from the outside, but there were three sections. Outside, there were turtles roaming around and some bunnies and guinea pigs outside. The amount of children and parents that were hanging around weren’t too much, but we did go on a week day.
The first section after entering the main door was Cat Heaven. Cats in hanging baskets, cats on pillows, cats zooming across the beams above us! There was a very comfortable pig lounging in the corner but there wasn’t any intense smells that would make you backtrack. There were also many small to medium dogs hanging out, looking for open arms to nestle in.
One final door and you would enter in to see the Boss. And who is that, you’d ask, is it the llama or the capybaras? This was probably the part that blew my mind because I didn’t think there would be these animals here. The llama was a definite troublemaker because he started munching on the curtains and messing with the tortoise’s tree branches. The capybaras had their own mini island on one side of the room that had a little waterway. I totally forgot there were five kangaroos bouncing around as well. Talk about stimulus overload!
kangaroo in the background! 
capybara snacks also available
Overall, you can probably sense my excitement over having seen so many animals in one day. I still can’t get over it. I would definitely suggest it to families to are traveling with kids, or just about anyone looking for a chill day. It’s good to get out of the city and take a breather sometimes and this is a great option to have.
The address is : 1 Chome-1-10 Kaigandori, Minato Ward, Osaka, 552-0022, Japan
Please comment if you’ve been or are planning to! I’d love to hear about it!
Baking Traveller 