Doutonbori Street is Osaka’s primary entertainment district. It comes to life at night: bright, noisy and crowded.
Some of us were looking for a bar where we could buy some sake. This proved surprisingly difficult to find, at least for clueless tourists speaking little Japanese.
We wandered into some sort of multi-story entertainment center with a Roaring Twenties/Taishou Era theme.
This was a mistake. All of the bars and lounges in the building seemed to serve only fake non-alcoholic beverages. Finally we found a little hole-in-the-wall bar that served actual sake.
For future reference, when looking for a place that sells sake it is probably best to ask about “Japanese sake” (nihon no osake). “Sake” by itself can mean any alcoholic beverage including beer. When ordering, just ask for “hot sake” (atsui osake o kudasai) or “cold sake” (tsumetai osake o kudasai).
(Of course you can always go the the 7-11 and buy it in little jars, but let’s hope we never get that desperate.)
After that we went looking for food. If we had wanted a crab dinner it would have been easy, but the consensus seemed to be for sushi. We wandered around looking at a number of restaurants, but none seemed to have sushi.
Finally a waitress at one of the wrong restaurants took pity on us and led us to a very nice sushi place…
…where you can get very fresh sushi.