Full day number 3. We've stayed 2 nights in Osaka, but we really haven't explored it yet. This morning, we were off to Ikeda just northwest of Osaka. It's still in Osaka prefecture, but is a little ways out from the Osaka city limits.
We had to take the Hankyu Takarazuka line out to Ikeda. If you ever find yourself in Osaka and ride a Hankyu train, you will find that the whole fleet of trains is a distinctive maroon colour. It looked impressive with all the Hankyu trains loading and unloading in Hankyu Umeda station.
This day, we were in search of the Instant Ramen Museum. It's formally known as the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum. Mr. Ando is the founder of the first ever instant ramen in Japan, known as Chikin Ramen. We initially had some trouble find the museum. There were some signs at Ikeda station pointing to which exit to go, but they were all in Japanese. If you don't read Japanese, you could very easily miss these signs.
Just outside Ikeda Station, we grabbed a quick breakfast at a small Western style restaurant. N just grabbed a quick bite of pizza toast and I had a slightly larger American style breakfast. It was actually really quiet in the restaurant. We weren't sure if we beat the rush or just missed the rush.
We then walked quickly down to the Museum. N booked us for an Making Instant Noodle session on the museum's website. So we had to arrive early in the morning at a certain time. Apparently we had booked spots 47 and 48 out of 48. So who were the other 46 persons? We arrived at the museum to join a 46 upper elementary school children in making instant ramen. I was definitely the oldest in the room. I may have even been older than their teacher.
The process of making the instant ramen noodles was very similar to making pasta. We had to mix the flour and oil together to create the noodle material. We also had a special hand-crank machine to flatten the mixture. Then we used the same machine to cut the noodles into its stringy form. We didn't actually get to do the frying, though. They had a whole team of workers gather our soft, stringy noodles and put them into the giant deep fryer in their kitchen. Then at the end, we get to keep the final product. We even had to design our own instant ramen package. Oh poor unartistic me.
After the noodle making session was done, we wandered the museum a little. There was the great historic timeline of instant noodles all starting with Chikin Ramen many decades ago. There was also a replica of Momofuku Ando's humble shack where he started creating Chikin Ramen many years ago.
Then, we realized we made a slight mistake. Instead of wandering the few exhibits in the museum, we should have really made a B-line for the Cup Noodle area. In the Cup Noodle area, you can design your own Cup Noodle cup and get it filled with freshly made noodles and flavouring. Unfortunately, our 46 noodle making accomplices had beat us out and got to the Cup Noodle area already. Which meant what is normally a 10-15 minute activity, took about an hour. In any case, it was pretty neat to see the giant set up for putting noodles and flavouring into your own personal Cup Noodle cup. It was quite the assembly line production complete with inflatable see-through bag to protect your precious creation.
After all that creating noodles, we needed to consume some noodles for lunch. In the back of the museum is a selection of instant noodle and drink vending machines. No need for a restaurant in a place that is built upon the word instant. We each purchased an instant noodle. N had a Wakayama style instant noodle complete with one real piece of dehydrated meat included. I got a duck flavoured noodle of some sort. We also got some drinks - a green tea for N and a Cafe au Lait for myself (for some reason, I was craving coffee a lot while in Japan).
We downed our instant lunch quickly because we wanted to get to Arima Onsen quickly. The more time we spent in Arima Onsen, the more worth our stay there would be. Arima was going to be our big splurge of the trip.
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