Thursday, I took most of the day to relax from the traveling all over the place, and get some work done, get some stuff prepared for the blog, chat with Teni (who I was beginning to miss a lot!), and just generally get re-organized. So, unfortunately, there’s not a ton to report about today. However, I do have some pictures of what sitting at home all day does to me:
In the evening, Mike and I went out on the town. We went downtown, and just generally hung out. Nagoya is a cool city. According to Wikipedia, “it is the capital of Aichi Prefecture and is one of Japan's major ports along with those of Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, Chiba, and Hakata. It is also the center of Japan's third largest metropolitan region, known as the Chūkyō Metropolitan Area. As of 2000, Chūkyō Metropolitan Area has 8.74 million people, of which 2.17 million live in the city of Nagoya.”
Quotes aside, my impression of Nagoya is that it’s very open and western-looking for a city in Japan. Mike told me that the reason for this is that Nagoya was used for military weapons stockpiles at one time, and that the American presence during the rebuilding of Japan after the war, heavily influenced the building styles and layouts. But enough of the history lesson. Mike decided to take me to a cool shopping area called Osu Shotengai (Shotengai is the word for a covered walkway. There are Shotengais in many cities in Japan).
We also came upon a random shrine at one part of the shotengai....it really surprised me.
Friday was another day dedicated to “gorogoro”, the onomatopoeic expression in Japanese for lazing around relaxing. I did venture out a little bit in the form of a walk around the immediate area around Mike’s place, but I didn’t take any pictures, so I’ll just leave the narrative there. Later, after Mike got back from work, we decided to go out to dinner with his friend Kozue. We went for Kaiten-Zushi. It was delicious and inexpensive at the place we went. Here are some shots from that night:
Got bored in the back of the car on the way home...haha:
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