Nagoya and Toyama adventures

Yeah I know. It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy. But because I’ve been busy, I now have awesome stories to tell you!

First off, last weekend I was bored so I decided to go to Nagoya. I took the train down in the morning, after missing the train I wanted to get on because none of the bloody ATMs open until 9am, and I was there by noon.

After wandering around the train station for a while I managed to acquire an English map of the city. That was all I really needed. My basic plan for the day had been to somehow get myself to Nagoya castle. I bought myself an all day all subways and bus pass and went off.

I ended up walking most of the way. I couldn’t figure out which subway station I wanted. It worked out because I saw lots of cool stuff. Some park that was full of water fountains, city hall, the city archives, and a huge TV tower.
Eventually I did make it to the castle. When I got inside I noticed a crowd of people gathered around a roped off area. The area had a sign saying something was happening at 2pm. As that was ten minutes from when I got there, I decided to hang around and watch.

I’m not sure what you’d call a show like that. 5 people came out dressed in historical outfits. 3 of the people had huge spears. I got really excited. I though they were going to fight. Sadly, they didn’t. Instead they danced. Yep. You read that right. They danced. To some weird pop-y music. At one point I think they were talking about historical stuff. At least I recognized one of the names as being historical so I’m kind of assuming that. The Japanese was way too fast for me to catch it all.

The show didn’t last all that long so then I went wandering around. They had these displays of flowers everywhere. Then I went inside the castle. It’s 6 floors. They had stuff from the original castle as well as reconstructed stuff. At the top there were a bunch of windows so you could see all of Nagoya. It was pretty sweet.
So after my touristyness, I went shopping at the underground mall near the station. Nothing really that exciting to report there so I’ll skip that and move on to what happened on Tuesday.

Tuesday, AKA yesterday, a bunch of us ALTs went to Toyama to go see the new Harry Potter movie. It was a holiday so none of us had work. I was one of the drivers. My baby made it no problem. The theatre we went to was in the middle of this huge mall so we also did a bit of shopping. I ended up running into one of my English teachers there which was kind of weird for both of us.

The main reason we chose this theatre, and why we drove an hour and half, is because this theatre had the movie in English with Japanese subtitles. Not only did that mean we could watch it in English, it also meant the theatre wasn’t full of children because they can’t read all the kanji/ read the subtitles fast enough.
After the movie we went to a second-hand shop followed by Don Quixote which is this weird everything store. It’s where most ALTs get their onesies. I found some hilarious stuff for people as well as a delightfully warm hoodie for myself.

Well that’s pretty much it for now. On Friday a bunch of us are going to Tokyo for the weekend so I should have more to report after that.