Nagoya

We zipped out to Nagoya in the Mie prefecture, with the intent of spending considerable time in that region. The city featured a few interesting buildings and lots of traffic, but we didn't feel any particular charm.

Our plan was to crash for a night in Nagoya, then head up to Gero Onsen for a relaxing night or two. We booked into the Dormy Inn Nagoya, which was decidedly less impressive than Dormy Inn Otaru. But it is conveniently located near the Nagoya red light district, if that's your thing.

That's three new hotels we've visited on Honshu, and two red light districts. We're on a roll.

Deciding to make the best of our time in Nagoya, we checked out the Nagoya science center. It was two buildings and a planetarium. Admission was $6 each, including our tickets to the planetarium show. Eat your heart out Science World. The annual pass ran $20.

So you would be fair in assuming that the Nagoya science world was pretty lame. Except you would be wrong. It was pretty darn awesome. I mean, everything was in Japanese, so it was pretty tough to understand some of the exhibits. But most of the things were interactive, and Jenn and I had lots of fun figuring out the rules of the games. Maybe a little more than we enjoyed the games themselves. And let's be honest here: zapping things with electricity is fun in any language.

We also checked out the planetarium show. I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe a similar script to the quickie 20 minute shows we get back home at our planetarium. Instead, we were treated to a 60 minute presenation on the cosmos, and a 10 minute intro on the NEW planetarium they are currently constructing, which will be a self-enclosed globe suspended between two buildings. It looks very cool.

The cosmos presentation was also pretty incredible, since I learned more about the constellations in a foreign language I could barely follow than I ever did back home. Which leads me to my current hypothesis: the Japanese are really sophisticated robots diguised as humans.

But I digress.

The second stage of our plan was Gero onsen. Unfortunately, after carefully navigating the Japanese language page of the onsen we wanted to stay at, it appeared they were not accepting reseverations anymore. At all. Ever. I'm uncertain if it was a glitch on the website, or if they were remodeling, or if they had gone out of business, but it was clear fate was not on our side.

It was about this time that we realized Nagoya wasn't really a city for us. We looked at the itinerary of things to do and see and decided we wanted to go elsewhere.

The next day we headed south for Ise, to visit the Umbrella Shrine. The shrine itself is one of the most sacred Shinto shrines in Japan: so sacred, in fact, the priests knock the shrine down every twenty years and build it again a few paces over. When you visit, you don't actually get to see the shrine, either, because it is that sacred. Instead, you get to view the sort of outer gate bits. And a sea of umbrellas as people wait their turn in the queue.

After the Ise Shrine, the drizzle became genuine rain as we searched for Samurai town. Several misadventures later, we realized that Mie was not for us and we left.