June 7, 2013

Today we decided to take it pretty easy since we have a couple really busy days coming up when we day-trip to Kyoto and Osaka. So we lollygagged around at Jen’s house, did some laundry, etc, until about 9:30am. We decided to walk to the Atsuta Shrine as it wasn’t too far from Jen’s house. Across the road from the park with the shrine was a train station with a grocery store (pretty much every larger train station is also a mall). We picked up some sushi to have a picnic lunch in the park and then went to look for a nice spot to sit and enjoy. 

We found a little pond with large fish and turtles so we staked out a bench and enjoyed peacefulness of the park and watched the turtles try and climb onto rocks. Our grocery store meal wasn’t too bad at all, with the exception of these little meat skewers that Ben was super excited about.

 He took one bite and the look on his face turned to one of excited joy to one of disgusted horror. As a side note, in Tokyo there were many signs that were in Japanese and English, here in Nagoya there is almost no English, so when it came to choosing a meat skewer Ben just chose one that had what looked like beef with some sort of barbeque sauce on it. Turns out it was some sort of organ meat, Ben said it was really tough and chewy and he figures it was maybe a pig heart. Immediately after the first bite into the “meat” he knew something was wrong and he was like, “no, no, it’s not good”. He couldn’t even choke down the one piece, he spat it out back into the container and we threw it away (wasteful? Yes. Did I try a piece? Are you joking me? Of course not, if Ben couldn’t choke it down there’s no way that I could have).

After our lunch, we wandered around in the park and saw a couple older ladies dressed up in kimonos. The area we were in didn’t really have any shops or other points of interest, so we took a train to Sakae which is more of a shopping district. This is where all the big name stores like Prada, Coach, Tiffany, etc have their stores. But after all the walking around we did in Tokyo, this was just more city and it wasn’t overly interesting. However we did find a train station/bus terminal called The Oasis, which has an oval roof covered in water, so that was pretty cool.

 We poked around in some of the shops and then caught the subway back to Jen’s house.

In Nagoya, we have already come across more people who have commented on Ben’s height, some people just point at him and giggle (mostly kids do this, not so much the adults). Also, I forgot to mention yesterday about the bathroom situation on the bullet train. There was one stall labeled “Japanese Toilet”, one stall labeled “Western Toilet” and one stall labeled “Gentlemen’s Room”, which was just a urinal. The toilet rooms had doors with a vent grate type of thing inset in the door for air flow. The “Gentlemen’s Room” had one as well, but it was half grate and half window, so you could look right in there, I guess to see if the room is occupied or not. I seem to remember many years ago reading a passage in a Dave Berry book about this very same issue; hard to believe at the time but now I have seen with my own eyes that there is a legit window into the urinal room on the train. Also, Ben downloaded an app to see how fast the train was going; we were clipping along at an impressive 250 km/h.

This afternoon a crazy storm rolled in, the sky was black and there was lightning and loud, booming thunder that shook the house. It started pouring rain just as Jen got home at about 5pm. We visited for a bit and waited for Naoya to get home from work, then we went out for, as Jen puts it, the best raman in the world. I have to say, I’ve never had real raman before and this was pretty delicious.

 I had spicy, Ben had curry, Naoya had regular and Jen had super spicy (which she later regretted). After our delicious dinner we wandered around the train station and looked at the different stores and wandered through the arcade. Jen was all fired up because she had a belly full of spicy noodles and also because apparently they don’t go out much in the evenings. Then we walked to a really nice big mall and wandered through stores and bought some food for tomorrow. I was looking for sushi USB sticks for Dennis, but I only found one and it was almost $30 CAD so I didn’t buy it. We did pick up a couple other little things for people back home. After our little shopping excursion we came home and visited for a bit and now it’s almost 11:30pm, so late for us! But overall we had a pretty low-key day and it was nice not to be rushing to try and see everything and just relax and be lazy for a while.