Day 22: Enlightenment

Friday March 18th, 2011 by Giel Op 't Veld

Last night’s karaoke called for sleeping in and that we sure did, as we wanted to spend our last day relaxed. Refreshed, we visited the last cultural highlight of our trip: the Kaiyukan Osaka Aquarium. Its main attraction, a gigantic whale shark, can only be found in three aquaria in the world! Kaiyukan is built around a tank of 9 metres in height, which contains sea life from the Pacific. Visitors start at the top and spiral downwards around this tank while they enjoy looking at animals such as dolphins, penguins and corals in smaller tanks on the side. This construction was fascinating, as you were continuously introduced to new fish as you went deeper, while you were still able to see the rest swimming at different heights. As a consequence, the same fish tank could fascinate one over and over again at every level. We therefore spent quite some time at Kaiyukan, but we all agreed that it was definitely worth it.

After some free time, we concluded our study tour with a dinner at an izakaya in the famous Namba district. The all-you-can-drink menu took little time to kick in and provided us with an open and fun atmosphere to review all that we had experienced over the past three weeks. We discussed the cultural differences, which sights were most beautiful and also the technology and innovations we had seen. All pieces of the puzzle slowly fell together and we began to better understand the business and engineering mentalities, which are so different from our own. Speeches and toasts then concluded the evening and we returned to our hotel (or the local arcade halls) tired and well-fed.