Brother Annie

Nagoya was our last stop on a long ass day. We arrive at the station and had to ask for directions to our hostel. This time it was in a much less dodgy area of town than Peace House Showa from Tennoji. After dumping our stuff off at the hostel, we headed out for some an awesome ramen dinner. It was a delicious end to a long day of walking.

The next day we went in search of things to do before my friend Akane would meet up with us in the evening. I’d heard of a rather big temple which I wanted to check out, however, we ended up getting ridiculously turned around, and ended up walking in circles for a good half hour until I finally asked a guy on the street where Kanayama shrine was. Something I’m starting to notice about the Japanese, is that when you ask them a question, even if they don’t know the answer at the time, they will work until they give you one. In the case of giving directions, when I asked this guy if he knew where the shrine was, he thought about it, kinda looked around for landmarks, and then waved me over to follow him as he jogged down the road for like, oh, TWO BLOCKS. Anyways once I was sufficiently out of breath we found the shrine. It was tucked in between two buildings. Talk about a stark change. But it was a really small, local shrine actually, and very nice.

After that we kept walking until we hit an arcade with a bunch of crazy games. One of them was this pod which you got into and it was like you were actually inside the gundam/robot/whatever. Inside was basically just a rounded white wall on which the game was displayed by a projector. Virtual reality five! There were also lots of other strange games like a taiko (Japanese drums) version of DDR, or something.

After the arcade we decided to head out to the town to see a fancy bus station called Oasis 21. We befriended a guy at the arcade named Ken, and when we asked him where the Oasis 21, he just offered to drive us there himself. Turns out he’d lived in America as well as Australia, which was why his English was spot on as far as accents go. He ended up giving us a little bit of a tour of downtown Nagoya, and it was really quite cool.

At last we arrived at our destination and waved goodbye to Ken and headed off to the awesome bus station. It was only when I actually saw the thing that I realized I’d been there before. When I was 16 years old, I lived in Japan for 6 weeks in Toyota city (right by Nagoya), and one of the American English teachers (Tony) took me to Nagoya one day to show me around, and Oasis 21 was one place we visited. Along with this we saw the Nagoya TV tower, which was visible from the station. It was quite nostalgic.

Now, because I’m stupid, I didn’t get any photos of what came next. We met up with my friend Akane (who I hadn’t seen in 5 or so years). It was really good to see her again, though her Kiwi accent had faded (she learned her English in New Zealand). First we hit up a British style pub (with no Brits in it! weaksauce). There we met two other American dudes who came up to chat with us. They were both just visiting I think, but it turns out they were staying in the same hostel as us (Hostel Ann), and after the pub we all headed out for karaoke, where I proceeded to tear up my throat like nothing else. It was pretty fun, and we did a Maccahs run afterwards. Our two American friends ended up following us back to our room, I think they were just being social, but it was 3 in the morning and we all wanted to sleep. Anyways when they finally left we crashed.

The next day we did our best to get up early and leave, saying goodbye to Akane. After a Starbucks run, we headed off to the next stop: Mt. Fuji.