I told you dropping that Disneyland update in between the two Nagoya updates would work well! Haha!
I awoke at around 10am in my luxury not-so-bad crappy hotel, thanks to the guy on the other side of the razor-thin hotel wall listening to his TV at a level sufficent enough to blow the windows out. Needless to say I was not a happy bunny as I headed to the station. The plan was to quickly dump my bag in a coin locker at the station, explore Nagoya a bit, then hop on the train to Gifu. Unfortunatly, despite big shiny “Coin Lockers This Way!” signs, they are still impossible to locate, and I had to resort to asking the security guards in a shaky voice. Eventually though they did all the hard work for me and I was on my way.
I decided to follow my nose in Nagoya on a quest for breakfast. On the way I took a load of random snaps of whatever caught my interest, resulting in a load of rubbish pictures, and only a few good ones. The traffic light photo, that is currently at the top of the blog was one of said random photos, although it really was the only good one out of about sixty billion. Nagoya sort of reminded me of Tokyo, in that it had skyscrapers and lots of people, although neither were quite as dense as Tokyo. It certantly was a lot nicer walking around without having to avoid schoolgirls, old people and bycycles every ten seconds.
However, Nagoya failed to hold my interest after I had found breakfast, so I quickly made my way back to the station and hopped on the train to Gifu. The train ride itself was about 30 minutes, and I think I took that train three or four times. As a result I can give a really rather impressive description of the decoration on the back of the seats, because that’s all I had to do on the journey. It was blue. With red lines.
When I arrived in Gifu, I had half a day to kill while Mari was at her part time job. In a throwback to my Kyoto trip, I headed straight of the shrines, because I sure do love me some Japanese shrines.
I know I say this all the time, but they really were pretty shrines. One thing that did happen, for the first time ever, is that I actually got a nice photo of one of the statues in the shrine.
Isn’t he nice. Well, he doesn’t look very friendly, but then if you had to sit on that stone guarding a bright orange shrine all day, you wouldn’t be grinning at people with shiny cameras come to take photos of you at work. I bet he works overtime, too…
Quite by accident, I found myself sitting in the park just a few minutes walk from the shrine, when something caught my eye. It was a steel staircase, that wound its way up about three stories for no apparent reason. As it was outside in a park, I assumed I wouldn’t get in much trouble if I went up it to take a look around. It gave me a nice view of the park itself, the shrine and the surrounding area, but it didn’t end there. Leading away from the top was a walkway which lead to a path, which wound it’s way up through a forest and up what looked like a mountain. As I plan to climb Mt. Fuji in the summer, I thought this was the best opportunity I might get to practice. So I began to climb.
About half an hour later it became clear that this was not a mountain but just a big hill. Still, it provided some excellent views of the city.
Eventually I made it to the top of the hill, although I didn’t stick around very long because I was being turned into a human barbeque by the sun and local insects. Infact, I made my way back down pretty sharpish, and headed back to the station to meet Mari.
Mari had brought with her a present. It weight around a tonne, was made out of steel, and went very very fast. That’s right! She’d brought a fighter plane!
Ok, well, a car. Still, it greatly improved our options for exploring Gifu. In the end we went for coffee (again!) and then went for a drive around the mountains. At one point we actually pulled up to the same place I’d just walked to earlier in the day (although I was a real man and had taken the dirt path. This had nothing to do with me not knowing there was a road up there. None at all.) Then we went around more shrines (woohoo!), had more coffee, then it was time to say goodbye. Curse these weekend long trips, they’re just too short!
Gifu is a super cool place, totally unspoiled by tourism (unlike Kyoto) and really quiet (unlike Tokyo). I’m currently planning out my summer holiday, and I think I may sweep by this place if I can, either on the way out or the way back. Although at the moment my holiday plans are top secret. If I tell you any more, I’ll have to kill you.
Possibly Related Content:
the traffic light photo may or may not be the only good one among hundreds – or perhaps you are being modest. But it’s super cool, so it doesn’t matter. I have been meaning to write and say so for days. Nice banner, good banner. Sit doggy.
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Anit Vipa: I’m mega proud of it, I personally think it’s one of the best photos I’ve ever taken. I always put my favourite pictures on my photosite, which is on the right hand side of the blog.