Golden Week 2009!

Greetings. Golden week is sadly over. I can't express how much I didn't want to return to work this week. Elliott came to Nagoya on the 1st and I showed him around town. We had some ramen for lunch and then drank in a park with some of my fellow teachers. God bless Japan and it's lack of open container laws. The next day Elliott and I went to Kyoto with only minor set backs. We were tired and uncertain of where we were supposed to change trains, so we spent about 30 minutes at a tiny station in the countryside of Japan waiting for a local train to come by and watching the shinkansen (bullet train) whiz past us (clearly it was mocking us). Other than that the trip was relatively uneventful. We stayed in a ryokan (traditional Japanese guesthouse).

It even had the kind of closet people always live in in anime shows, although if you're taller than me you won't fit. I could have lived there quite comfortably. On the right is our room. They had a basket in the corner with 2 yukatas so Elliott and I had no choice but to put them on. Then we got some dinner and walked around these 2 temples that were on either side of the place we were staying.

The next day we took a bus to a large temple up on a hill called Kiyomizu (pictured below). It was pretty big and had a good view of the city. Then we walked back down and did basically a large walking circle of Kyoto. We stopped in at any temple or shrine we passed (which were numerous). We hit up Heian Jingu shrine which was pretty huge. Then we saw the old imperial palace (or the wall that surrounds it, since you're not actually allowed inside). It's in a big park in the middle of the city. Then we went to the castle (Nijo-jo). It had a fabulous garden and squeaky floor boards so intruders wouldn't be able to sneak up on the residents. Then it was back to Nagoya for us to stay in my apartment for free.

The next morning we went to Tokyo on the shinkansen. It was ridiculously fast. It took less than 2 hours to get from Nagoya to Tokyo. The first day I saw Elliott's school and where he lives and whatnot. Day two we discovered that I wasn't actually allowed to stay in his dorm, so we went downtown, found a locker to store my bag in, and spent the rest of the day walking the rainy streets of Tokyo. We went to Shibuya, Harajuku and Shinjuku. That probably doesn't mean much to anyone, but they're three big areas in Tokyo. Shinjuku is mostly a business district. There's an observation floor in the Tokyo Municipal Building (in Shinjuku) that we went to. It rained the whole day so I couldn't actually see how ridiculously huge Tokyo is, but apparently on a clear day you can see Mt. Fuji from there.

We went to a club, stayed out all night, and I caught the first shinkansen back to Nagoya, which is at 6:00 am if anyone is wondering. I wish every week was golden week.