Adventures in Japan

Sixteen Days: Pretty In Nagoya

Not a lot to say about Nagoya. We slept in Nagoya last night and the night before. Well, Carla slept.

Yup.

We've been using it as a base, you see, just a place to keep our stuff as we went on day trips to more interesting places to do more interesting things.

It is just one of those big cities that a lot of foreigners live in but seems to us (foreigners just passing through) to be fairly foreigner unfriendly. Not enough (or misleading) signage, poor maps, tourist information and help that is not all that helpful nor informative.

Also, Nagoya could use more lockers. We set off from our hotel all loaded down, the plan was to dump our stuff in a locker and then bum around town. 'Why not just leave all your stuff at your hotel?' you may be asking. That is what we usually do, but our hotel in Nagoya was just a little to far from the station.

We spent half an hour, fully loaded down, searching for a place to keep our stuff. I have no idea how much our stuff weighs, but I know that it is a lot. We were not feeling happy. Especially me. I had done laundry the previous two nights.


'Laundry?' you ask, 'How can doing laundry make you so cranky?'

How long does it take you, Lord and Lady question asker, to do a week's worth of laundry? Does it take you two days? Two nights rather, to be more exact.

It took me 12 hours to do three loads of laundry. That is just dumb. Dumb like a machine that says it both washes and drys your clothes but really does neither. Dumb like a machine that doesn't wash nor dry taking FOUR AND A HALF HOURS to do neither. Dumb like a machine that doesn't inform you that it will take FOUR AND A HALF HOURS to not wash or dry your clothes until you've put in your money and it locks the door, trapping your clothes inside.

Dumb as me, opening up said door after FIVE FRICKIN HOURS (THE STUPID DUMB MACHINE NEEDS TO COOL DOWN FOR HALF AN HOUR, YOU SEE, BECAUSE IT WORKED SO VERY HARD FOR SO VERY LONG NOT WASHING OR DRYING MY DIRTY CLOTHES) and finding a sopping, steaming clump of clothes and deciding that if I put it in for another 90 minutes of just drying time, that might work. THAT DID NOT WORK. They were just as wet as before, just slightly less warm is all. So then I had to lug that load of laundry three blocks over to a laundromat that had machines that actually dried clothes.

Now imagine doing that in the middle of a torrential downpour. In the middle of the night. You know what happens to a 24 hour laundromat in the middle of the night in the middle of a rainstorm? It becomes a haven for hobos. Some of the homeless people are chatty. Some of them are surly. All of them are stinky (and wet). And all of them looked lustily at my wife's underwear.

That was an uncomfortable span of time.

But that is all in the past. As is the not being able to find a locker time. We eventually found a locker.

Being much less encumbered, we went to Nagoya's design museum. The design museum is just one part of a well designed building.


The museum was interesting and also very small. It had pictures and models of all sorts of different things; cars, buildings, home electronics. It also had a selection of cool looking chairs, only some of which we available for sitting. There were also four big display boxes in the middle of the museum space. If you pushed the shiny red, candy-like button on the front of the box it would rumble to life.


Within each box were nine smaller boxes and they would slowly rotate. Each box had a different theme and would show how the design of different things have evolved over time. That was cool, but the whole museum couldn't have taken more than an hour.

Luckily, there was another cool thing right next door. It was an exhibition of pinhole camera photography. And the hand-made pinhole cameras that shot said photos. Some of the cameras were better looking than the photos they took. There was always something to look at. The clarity and colour of these low tech shots shamed me and my lack of skillz. It made Carla want to start making her own pinhole cameras. Ask her about it when we get home.

Then we just wandered around, killing time until our bus departed.


There was a big TV tower and a cool looking building and then we left.