If you're reading this blog looking for the kind of entry where stuff happens, of any description, please skip today's entry. Deliberately, and most welcom-ly, we did practically nothing today.

After today, I put Nagoya in the same basket as Osaka. I've tried to like it. I really have. This is the second time we’ve visited here, but the city just isn’t for me.

Osaka seems like a nightlife, drinking and clubbing hub, with some excellent food interdisbursed if you can stand the crowds. Nagoya just feels like one big central business district. Businessmen in suits abound, and everyone seems to be in a rush to get everywhere. Even "Central Park" is little more than a wide medium strip between 2 roads, with a big TV tower in the middle of it. Underwhelming.
Apologies to the good people of Nagoya. You seem nice enough, and your city is clean, and well laid out. It's just...dull. It's the same impression we got last time we visited. It's close to the illumination and Nagashima, so that's one thing it has going for it.

After the madness of the trip so far, today was deliberately a “do nothing” day, and we were determined to stick to that plan. Not leaving the guesthouse until around 11am, we wandered East in search of the central shopping district around Sakae. Apparently it’s good. We didn’t think so.

The weather was not on our side. Rain again, and the umbrellas came out. It didn’t really bother us too much since we had nothing planned for today, but it would have been nice not to have to walk around in the rain.

Highlight of the walk was the McLaren dealership. A couple of cars, posed in a sterile, dust free showroom, just as you’d expect, but an unusual thing to see.

Sakae was, for us, underwhelming. We visited Oasis 21, which was a multimillion dollar bus shelter, with an impressive looking and inventively named “roof floor”, accessible via an elevator, and housing a mini lake with a glass bottom in the centre. The floor which people were walking around was also transparent, and from below you could see the feet of the people walking around the outside of the roof/floor. Amusing for around 45 seconds, but maybe I’m just getting harder to please.

Oasis 21 itself is forgettable. Made up of a bunch of stores we didn’t want to shop at, and restaurants we had no hope of getting into, the complex was essentially worthless to us. I also expected it to be bigger, given the size of the other shopping arcades in Japan, but it was tiny by comparison.

We tried walking to the other shopping centres, but finding not much open on the restaurant floors for some reason, we gave up, defeated, and caught the subway back to Nagoya station.

So with plenty of time to kill, and Google maps at the ready, you think we’d be able to find the miso katsu restaurant I wanted to try yesterday, right? Nope. Still couldn’t find it. Walked for ages, and found the spot where it was supposed to be, and it just wasn’t there. It was probably on one of the floors above us or below us. I didn’t care. By that stage I was just so sick of playing hide-and-go-seek with this stupid goddamn restaurant we gave up, and returned to the underground mall in front of Nagoya station, where we know that food is actually available.

We settled on a place called “Golden Hamburg”. A similar restaurant to Bikkurri Donkey, these guys serve really tasty Japanese style “hamburg steak” meals for a reasonable price (~ $12 each). Still not as good as Bikkuri Donkey, but I don’t think any hamburg restaurant will ever be.

Tomorrow morning we check out of our guesthouse and move onto our first Toyoko Inn hotel stay for the trip in Gifu City.

The Nishiasahi guesthouse has just been ok. Nothing special, but nothing to really complain about either. We’re basically sleeping on the floor in what amounts to a square room with 5 beds and just enough space to put our luggage..and that’s about it. We’ve got a kitchen and dining room right outside our literally paper-thin doors, and the floors creak whenever a human walks on them, so every person that walks by in the middle of the night inches from your head, you can guess their weight and shoe size by the volume and length of the creaking that each footstep makes.


But a guesthouse is really only as comfortable as the other people make it. For our 3 nights here we’ve had pretty considerate fellow guests. On the first night there were some noisy Germans, but they went to bed pretty quickly, and aside from that, it’s been ok. It’s enough however for me to reassess whether hostel stays for the rest of the trip are appropriate though, especially the ones without our own bathrooms.