Cosplay Street Festa, Osaka

This weekend was the Osaka Street Festa, in which over 10 000 cosplay fans from around the world swarm upon Osaka's Denden town to either demonstrate or look at cosplay.

Hundreds of people dress up in elaborate cosplay costumes and stand around in the street, awaiting people to come and request to photograph them. You can buy photography passes, which supposedly gives you photo priority over the other masses (Cosplayers reportedly pose better for those with paid passes). However, Jason and I didn't have a paid pass, and we found the cosplayers to be fine with posing for us to take snaps on our mobile phone.

There were some serious photographers there, some even decked out with light reflectors and enhancers to get the perfect shot of some of the beautiful cosplayers.

While there was a huge amount of attractive young girls at the Street Festa, not all the cosplayers were as aesthetically pleasing... We say old men dressed as school girls, fairies, and all manner of scantily clad women... Some of these outfits were done well, and I would go so far as to say some were quite classy corss-dressing outfits, some were not... Rotund man with his hairy belly sticking out of his crop top, I'm talking to you...

But each to their own...

To get to the street festa, we caught the train to Namba station, and then walked about 15 minutes to Nipponbashi (denden town). We followed google maps for the first part of the walk, and the interestingly dressed individuals led us for the second half...

The street festa also has live music and demonstrations, but we didn't see any while we were there, around 2pm.

After walking around Street Festa, we decided to go to Tennoji to see the zoo and the shitennoji temple.

So we walked from Denden to Tennoji area (around 25 minutes) and came to the Tennoji Zoo. It only costs 500 yen to enter, and it's actually a fairly large zoo for such a small entry fee. Jason and I spent a good deal of time there, and left without seeing everything because we both started to get weary (we're both a bit sick at the moment). We were actually amazed at the flamingo display, one of the first things you see upon entering the zoo. I had never seen flamingos in real life before and their colour is so much more shocking than it seems in the pictures. It looks like someone has dipped them in high lighter liquid. They're an intensely fluro orange.

We were also impressed by the cougar and the wolves, which came up the the glass. While this is so amazing to see, however, sadly, their pacing may signal annoyance or distress. Their enclosures were quite small for roaming animals, with concrete floors. This part was quite sad. The African animals had large enclosures with grass and real dirt, but other animals had quite depressing enclosures. The penguins and polar bears were especially sad, with no ice, only concrete painted white. The polar bear's water was dirty and filled with debris. The bird enclosures were quite good, containing real trees for the birds to roost in. So all up, it was a mixed experience for me, alhough still good value.

Shitennoji Temple was another 20 minute walk from the zoo. By this point, Jason and I were getting exhausted and weary, but I really wanted to see the temple while we were in the area. So we walked on.

Shitennoji temple is a large complex with multiple religious buildings. On the path leading to the main temple, there are a bunch of classic festival type stalls, with foods like taiyaki, okonomiyaki, and yakisoba. There were also some stalls selling knickknacks, although I'm not sure if this was just because ot was a Sunday. I did hear that on the 21st of each month there is a huge flea market here though! So I'll be sure to come back on the 21st sometime!

We bought a warm custard obanyaki (round, pancake-like cake fiilled with custard) for just 100 yen. The warm cakey goodness and near-scalding filling revived me!

We had a breif look around the temple grounds and just as we were about to leave, I noticed lots of people looking down into the moat below the bridge. I told Jason we should go look, and we found... a million turtles in the moat below! They were every where!