robots.

we met a chatty obaachan (=grandma) at the sento this evening. when she found out that we understand a little japanese, she just wouldn't stop blabbering. i was too tired and didn't understand most of it but occasional nodding and a "sô desu ka" here and there seemed to satisfy her. she even gave me and ana an o-mamori (amulet)!

ana and me visited the heian shrine this morning. we took the wrong bus and lost our way a few times before we found it and it wasn't really that interesting, also the people there were rather unfriendly. at noon, we ate lunch at an italian restaurant at the main station - real european food for the first time in 6 weeks! after lunch we met with julian and went to Nagoya which takes only half an hour from Kyoto with the hikari shinkansen. we didn't visit anything special there except the spaceship aqua of the oasis 21 complex, just walked around and did some shopping and found a robot museum where we spent about an hour in the museum shop playing with all the fancy robots and toys and i bought myself a robot tshirt and a nohohon zoku.



kyoto

the hippo club.

today i went to Nagoya with julian, his host mother and her friend ame-chan. Nagoya looks like an interesting city, although the streets of Osaka seemed much more cleaner. we'll definitively make a trip to Nagoya with the japan railpass during our week in Kyoto again to see more of it!

we primarily went to Nagoya to visit the tokugawa art museum and tokugawaen (a landscape garden) but later, when ame-chan's friend fu-chan joined us, we spent the evening walking around in sakae, probably one of the main shopping/entertainment districts of Nagoya.

there was this huge complex called "oasis 21" with a large fountain/pool on the "water spaceship" roof and a great view over the neighbourhood and at the famous tv tower. as it was already evening, we went to a little restaurant where i drank my first beer here in japan. as you may know i'm not so crazy about beer but i drank a glass with 'em because it was fun and so cliché. but i got tipsy quickly (and sober again even quicker haha) and got an headache from the permanent nodding while talking to the japanese women.

by the way, the tokugawa museum was great, definitively worth a visit. there was this one crazy drawing of the ninomaru garden of the nagoya castle which really fascinated me because the perspective permanently changed and you could look at it for hours. i wasn't allowed to take pictures but ame-chan got me a little book at the souvenir shop with a picture of it as a gift.

the garden also was beautiful. there were koi in the pond and when i was watching them swirl around, an elderly woman came and started clapping her hands. she said that you can call the kois by doing so and really! they all gathered around her in no time.

nagoya