Nagashima Spaland

This week on my day off my friends and I went to Nagashima Spaland which is an amusement park about an hour drive outside Nagoya. For unknown reasons Peter Rabbit is the mascot of Nagashima Spaland. In the summer it also has a water park and there's a public bath which we didn't go to, so I'm sure we'll go back sometime in the summer when it gets ridiculously hot. I went with two of my fellow ECC teachers and three Japanese friends. My friend Yu has a van so he drove us all there. Below most of the group is pictured in our sweet ride (Kate and I were in the back so we're not visible). In the middle seat are Takuya and Shannon, and in the front are the Yu's (it's confusing enough having one person named Yu when you're speaking in English, much less two, but we managed it somehow).

I went on a Japanese highway for the first time. We went over this really huge bridge, and our Japanese friends mocked us for getting excited about the highway. Since we went on Tuesday it was pretty empty so we didn't have to wait for rides at all. As we were wandering around we stumbled across these performers. They juggled flaming torches for a while and for their grand finale they balanced on boards on top of cylinders on top of boards on glasses. It was quite intricate. Oh, and they were wearing flaming hats too. The one that's facing the camera's hat said "fire ok" on it. It was pretty impressive, they juggled the torches back and forth.

The roller coaster below is the Steel Dragon 2000. Apparently it's the longest roller coaster in the world.

We rode this one twice. There was also this ride that was kind of like a luge that was pretty fun. Nagashima also has a big outlet mall so after we just couldn't stand to ride rides anymore we got some food and went shopping. We split up in the outlet mall and the girls and I ended up in the lego outlet building a house at the lego station. This is the finished product.

All and all I'd say it was a spectacular day off, even though personnel tried to ruin it for me by offering me some overtime on my day off.