Nagoya Trip

I had planned to go to Nagoya on Saturday, but it turned out that I couldn’t find a place to stay for that night, and also my friend wasn’t available until Monday, and I didn’t have so many places that I wanted to see that I felt like I would be able to fill up three days. So I had a fairly relaxing and normal Saturday, cleaning, climbing, and reading. On Saturday I woke up at 5:30 to catch the 6:50 train to Nagoya. It was really painless—uncrowded, cheap, and relaxing.

From Nagoya station I went to the train museum, which is rated as the best museum in Nagoya if I remember correctly. Maybe it is if you know and love trains, but I don’t really. It was interesting, but I only spent about an hour there, and I felt like I didn’t understand a lot because I don’t know anything about trains. If I could go there with someone who was passionate about trains, I’m sure it would be a good experience, but outside of that I wouldn’t recommend it.

From there I went to the Tokugawa garden. It was a really nice garden that had a single Japanese style, unlike the enormous Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo. I’m sure I would really like it if I lived there. As it was, it was a nice place to visit, but not particularly memorable. From there I walked for an hour to the Toyota museum. On the way I got lunch from the convenience store, including a vanilla butter coffee. It was too sweet, but I enjoyed it. I’m pretty sure it made me dehydrated though. The Toyota museum was just as good as I remembered. I only had an hour before it closed, but I used almost all of it. I still missed a couple of exhibits, so I wouldn’t mind going back. Plus, it was only $5 to enter.

The hostel that I stayed at was reasonably nice. At first I got in the bed and was upset that there weren’t any sheets. “But at least there’s a nice body pillow, that’s nearly as good,” I thought. Then after about an hour, I realized that the body pillow was actually the sheets rolled up. Hah. The beds were capsule-like, which is comfortable but a little hot and stuffy even when the temperature is around 10 degrees Celsius outside. At some point someone turned on the heat, which was completely unnecessary in my opinion, so I didn’t get to sleep in but I probably managed 6 hours of sleep.

In the morning I walked to Tokyo station and put my stuff in a locker. I was then barely ten minutes early to the café where I was meeting my friend instead of the thirty minutes that I had planned. We met and drank coffee I had a salty honey latte, which was… very salty. Not bad, but I wouldn’t have it again. Next we went to a hitsumabushi restaurant. This is an eel dish, probably the most famous dish from Nagoya. It was fantastic, but we ended up waiting an hour and a half for it. After lunch I had planned to go to a castle outside of the city, but I decided that since the afternoon was nearly spent already I should probably just go home, and that’s what I did.