How we found our hotel's street at night

Calendrier

We had to rush back from the Aquarium to be fashionably late for our dinner reservation at the 1 Michelin star French restaurant Calendrier. Chef Ryozo Monguchi prepares classic French style cuisine. We even had frogs legs for the first time. The amuse-bouche was pretty cool too. Croquettes filled with foie gras soup. You have to be careful eating them because they will squirt. The restaurant was full. Monday must be a big day because we had the most number of knockbacks ever. So I'm glad we made reservations.
We must've made some sort of impression because Ryozo, the chef, came out to greet us at the end of the night. Didn't happen to anyone else as far as I could tell.

Kaiyukan Aquarium Osaka

Not much to say about this except, AWESOME. It is the biggest aquarium in the world and has two whalesharks, the biggest fishes in the world. Okay, so these two fellas, or girls (who can tell?) were only 4 or 5 metres long but they're still big and awesome. As an aside we swam with a whaleshark on Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia and the one we swam with was around 9 metres.
The sea otters were cute, the seals regal and the small dolphins from the Tasman sea were fast. They also had some King Penguins which I've never seen in captivity before. It was actually quite weird seeing them in captivity as the last time we saw these huge penguins was on Macquarie Island on our way to Antarctica.
Anyway, enough yapping here are the pretty pictures.

Oh look, puffer fish

And speaking of fish. This afternoon we're off to the Osaka Aquarium.

Kigawa

Lunch on a rainy day in Osaka. Kigawa is in Dotonbori and was a bit of bitch to find. Michelin, helpfully, usually has a picture of the front of the restaurant to allow us foreigners a chance to find the place because most don't have any English names on display anywhere. Kigawa had no picture but unusually it had one of the small blue address number signs low down on the front wall almost out of sight. It took three trips around the block before we spotted it. Osamu Ueno is the head honcho here and it is a busy little place. We got used to going to empty or almost empty places but this one has people coming and going and a few people in the kitchen not just one or two. An excellent counter lunch at this 1 Michelin starred restaurant. The pork from northern Honshu was to die for. The guy serving us, , was another very helpful and friendly server going above and beyond.