Japan: Nagoya

The train from Toyama to Nagoya took almost four hours. It wound through the mountains. The Japanese organizers thought ahead and had gotten wifi routers that they carried around with them, so we were able to scroll through various social media to pass the time. We talked to each other and we admired the view from the train of the Japanese countryside. I even saw a Japanese Serow from the window of the train! No one understood what I was describing so I spent a long time on wikipedia until I figured out what it was (a goat-antelope in case you were wondering). 

Watching skiing fail videos.

And we slept a lot.

We checked into our hotel, Nagoyakatei Miyoshi, which played an Enya album on repeat in the lobby. 

This hotel room was even smaller than the previous one. We got to know each other really well. No showers again, so we showered at the hot springs again.

We then headed back out to our dinner.

 Reid making friends with our dinner.

The appetizer was shredded radish with baby sardines.

The main course was eel and it ended up being my favorite thing that I ate on the trip! I found it very delicious. You ate it in three steps. The first was by itself. The second was with wasabi and seaweed. The third was with soup. Step two was my favorite. 

The hotel provided Yukatas again. We dressed up and went to breakfast after not enough sleep. 

 I greatly improved my chopstick dexterity on this trip. 

We had the most formal meetings out of all of the three trips. For a few days we could wear just business casual. For a few meetings we needed to dress up especially nice. We were given a strict dress code, so we all ended up matching pretty well.

We took the subway to the end of the line to the SCMaglev and Railway Park. It was a train museum run by JR (Japanese Railway). We had a presentation and then a guided tour of the museum before we were let to explore.

 We got to ride in a Maglev simulator. Maglevs (Magnetic Levitation) are high speed rails that can go up to 500km/hr (310 mph). The simulator showed you what going 500km/hr felt like. At that speed you could get from Los Angeles to San Francisco in an hour and fifteen minutes. They run by electromagnetic fields (or something, not my area of expertise) and they levitate. Once they get going the wheels retract. 

The diorama room was a huge hit. It was an incredibly intricate and detailed kinetic diorama of a city that showed train activity over the course of 24 hours. There were even tiny light fireworks over the city at the end. 

There was even a mini rock concert. The band had tiny instruments and moved. Whoever designed this diorama had a sense of humor. There was even a tiny fan being given medical attention on a stretcher. 

Maglev!

 Walking around a history of rolling stock

We then went back to the Nagoya city center to meet with an engineer from Toyota who told us about an engine he designed and the difficulties of not having a universal set of emissions standards. We then shopped around for our new cars for when we all start our very lucrative civil servant careers.

We got generous bowls of udon topped with a raw egg for lunch. We all tried to slurp the noodles gracefully. We all needed to wear our white shirts the next day and we couldn't spill.

Our poor organizers overemphasized the necessity of punctuality, yet we were always still running behind. I think it is hard to organize 16 lost young adults. We got our work out for the day as we all went sprinting through the Nagoya train station with our luggage and coats dragging behind us to make our train to Tokyo. We made it with a solid 30 seconds to spare and we not so politely shoved our way on the train to make sure we all got on.

We rode on the Tokaido Shinkansen which is the oldest high speed rail in Japan. It opened in 1964.

We rode a lot of trains.

The Japanese organizers thought ahead and reserved us all seats on the left side of the train so that we could see Mt. Fuji from the train as we passed. It is a very impressive volcano. It appears out of nowhere and it huge and towering and we could see it for awhile! The mountain seemed to stand perfectly still while the cities rushed by past it.

We arrived back in Tokyo an hour and forty minutes later. 

Transpo Team takes on Tokyo

The first thing we did when we got back to Tokyo was go out to dinner. We went to a Ninja Restaurant. I asked Mahito how he picked that place and he said he had googled "Restaurants for tourists in Tokyo". We were guided through a maze of dark rooms by ninja dressed waiters and waitresses until we got to our own private room. We were served several courses of food with the word ninja in front of it. We had ninja water, ninja sashimi, and a variety of other ninja goods. At the end of the dinner the ninja waiters did magic tricks for us with cards and I got to keep a card as a souvenir. 

Exhausted, sleep deprived, and full of ninja food, we finally made it back to our hotel in Tokyo.