So much dancing

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Another little bit later start, the bed is so great. We went back to the Osaka Caste Park to visit other of the attractions there.

The Osaka Peace Museum, Officially the International Peace Center. The musuem was built ib 1991, and focuses on the destruction of the city during WWII. The tragedies of war in general, and how Osaka has recovered.

The first exhibit was the most informative, and across the spectrun of historical exhibits I would rate it in the top 10 as for amoubt of information presented in a digestable manner. That sounds awkward, I dont know the first room was great. It was mostly a video describing the turn of the last century through WWII.

Many Westerners forget that Japan was a big deal back then, the Meiji Restoration catapulted Japan into western modernity in 50 years, doing the took the Russian Empire 125 years. Japan not only fought alongside Britain and France in WWI, but played a prtty important role tying up Triple Alliance colonial assets in the Far East.

From 1895 to 1945 the Japanese were fighting major conficts, first the Sino-Japenese war kicked up as Japan invaded the Korean Peninsule (a Chinese vassal state at the time) and then Chine proper, to "protect" it from the Russians. Shortly there after got into fisticuffs with Russia, which by most accounts was the first battle of modern times, less than 10 years after that the Japenese got caught up in WWI, stuck around for the White War, then started aggressing into SouthEast Asia, promarily to get resources to continue the war in China. And then unfortunately allied themselves with Hitler and Mussolini, and then attacked the US, and managed to fight off the US, until we switched all of our factories from butter to guns.

All of this was presented in a manner such that Laura, lacking the history-boner that i have for the time period, had an appreciation of what set the stage for the events of the rest of the musuem.

The rest of the museum had various displays of life in wartime, household goods, class room textbooks, soldier diaries, civilian accounts of the firebombing during WWII.

Then went on to talk about reconstruction, and what happened after the allied proscribed reconstruction.

The final section of the museum seemed to be atleast endorsed by the UN. Describing what can be done to help prevent these things in the future, how the world has changed since then and how shitty the world often is.

(There were no pictures allowed in the museum)

Concluding the musuem we wandered north, heading towards the Osaka City Hall, and surrounding river island.

On the way we stumbled into a Curry shop, ate some delicious, inexpensive curry.

The island in the river, is made of parks, museums, the city hall, a public hall and various otherminor municipal buildings.

Nekanoshima park is pretty cool, wide open green spaces for children to run, or hipsters to play ultimate frisbee, while we saw niether of these taking place, we did see a bunch of teenage boys practicing a choreographed dance, which was neat. Also, they had a beer garden, though given the previous uses of the term "bar" and "cafe" around here i have my doubts about just how "beer gardeny" the place is.

There was an extensive rose garden, with more colors than i have ever seen in roses.

We decided to poke around the very cool 19th century styled public hall building. They had a little display in the basement referencing the construction, and reconstruction (you know, after the use sent a 329 bomber sortie to flatten the town) of the building.

While free, this was a little underwhelming, so we meandered about. Getting upstairs we heard music heading towards it, an older gentlemen in a nice shirt and slacks comes out of what appears to be a ballroom, we peek in the crack, he comes back from the toilet, and seemingly invites us in.

Initially we thought it was a wedding, then we noted not only was everyone dressed up, and dancing but they were dancing well. Moments later an older lady in a purple dress pointed us to the seating. We sat down and observed, an open dance broke out, and nearly everyone got on the floor, ballroom dancing to whatever the DJ was playing.

As best we can figure this was a ballroom dance club, that was having their regular meeting, we got out of there before they invited us to dance...

We headed home to figure out our evening activities. At the train station laura sniped some wifi, and we got the news of who our next president was. Stunned, we went home. On the way home we came upon another set of choreograph dancing kids... When we got home we watched a movie in bed, put pants back on and ventured out for some chicken based ramen (its traditionally pork). It was very light, and honestly,i liked the slices of chicken better than all but the BEST slices of pork (see earlier entry). We then looked through Dotonbori for sweet snacks, laura got a banana-nutella crepe, and i got a frozen fermented french butter cone. At least that was what thes sign said, I am pretty sure it was cultured butter, tossed into a soft serve machine. IT was fantastic.

We got some yogurt and pastry for an earlier roll out tomorrow, as we intend to hit up ANOTHER CASTLE YAY!