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.

It rained.

You knew that was coming, right? It's one of the unbreakable rules of the universe - when British people go to places, rain also goes to said places. I heard a collective groan from everyone in the entire park when the rain joined the party, although Matt and I remained composed, without even the slightest amount of surprise.

Saying that, the rain wasn't so bad, and since we spent most of the day queuing for one particular ride, we weren't caught so badly. The day started with us meeting the Thai students and making the incredibly long journey to Disneyland. Half of the students managed to fall asleep on the Subway, but for those of us who didn't, the highlight of the journey was not losing any students. (In a future update you'll hear why that's so important…)

What was quite exciting was the final leg of the journey, for which we took the Disney Monorail!

The Disney monorail has Mickey shaped windows! Plus, the handles that hang down from the roof have Mickey ears! It's so exciting! Except for the fact it's still a train! It only took about 5 minutes though, so I guess I can pretend I enjoyed it.

When we arrived at the park, we were crestfallen to see so many other visitors. This was a Wednesday during the school term, yet there were thousands of children at the park in school uniform. This means they weren't skipping school, it meant the school had sent them to Disneyland. What on earth are they going to learn at Disneyland? That every toy comes to life when they sleep? Bah, send in the truancy officers, I say.

Currently at Tokyo Disneyland the theme is Hawaii. As a result, the parade that heads through the park twice a day is called something like "Aloha!" or "Aloha Aloha!" or possibly "Aloha Aloha, Aloha! Aloha? Aloha!" because that's pretty much the only word in the song they were dancing to. Still, the costumes were great, especially Mr. Pineapple.

The floats themselves had various Disney characters waving and dancing along with the music, but I have to be honest, I found them a little scary. I feel sorry for the three year olds who sat right at the front, although they didn't seem to share in my fear. Mickey never blinks. That makes him a vampire.

One of the biggest attractions of the day, the famous Space Mountain, was closed for renovation. So we were limited to only two big rollercoasters - Thunder Mountain and Splash Mountain. I enjoyed Splash Mountain a lot more by sitting in the middle row and letting two of the Thai students get soaked in my place. Thanks girls!

The one possible detractor of Space Mountain was that we spent so long queuing for the ride in fake underground caves that I forgot what the sun looked like. Still, I think that's part of the deal when you come to Disneyland.

One terrible, terrible thing did happen at Disneyland, however. Both Matt and myself had the shocking revelation that we have become too old for Disneyland. By around about 6pm the only ride we really wanted to go on was the Park Bench ride. Now, I want to make it clear that I still love extreme rollercoasters, but there really aren't any at Disneyland. We were ready to go home by 6pm, but sadly there was the promise of a fireworks display at 9pm, so we had to wait for that. The entire fireworks display was about thirty seconds long, which made everyone in the group incredibly annoyed that they had waited for what amounted to some flashing lights and a few bangs. If I wanted that I could have started a fight in a nightclub. Oh well.

All things said, Disneyland was a nice day out and definitely more fun than working. Without a doubt. However, I don't think I'll be going there again anytime soon. Plus, of all the people dressed up as famous characters, Simba was nowhere to be found. The Lion King is the best Disney film, people!

Because I am still waiting for some photos taken by Junten teachers, these updates are going to be slightly out of order. I actually went to Nagoya the weekend after we went to Disneyland and tried all those crazy activities with the Thai students. Please also bear in mind that it is currently six billion degrees in Tokyo and as such my laptop is melting almost as fast as I can type. 

If you consider either of these excuses to be good enough to justify how late this update is, please send a stamped address envelope to…

Anyway, my trip to Nagoya started as all good holidays do - by waking up at some terrible time in the morning. 4am to be precise. This is the second earliest time I've woken up this year, and I certantly have no intention of pushing it into third. Hopping (or rather falling) onto a virtually deserted train from Oji to Tokyo, I had plenty of time to contemplate why on earth I was putting myself through this. There was no way I was going to feel up for a day exploring Nagoya feeling like this. Thank goodness for the Shinkansen bullet train. A three hour, 130mph journey that I slept the entirity of. Now I'm ready to face Nagoya!

I was met at the station by my good buddy Mari, who I met on my final day in Kyoto. Mari lives in the town of Gifu, about 15 minutes from Nagoya, making it her local major city. Thus I was very grateful to have a Nagoya pro to show me around. After having lots of coffee, we headed to Nagoya Castle, about a 15 minute Subway ride from the centre. The old saying "You never do anything until people come to visit" was proven true once more, as it was Mari's first time to see the castle.

Yes, it's the most stereotypical Japanese castle I've ever seen. Aside from the colour, I suppose. Each of the four floors of the castle is host to a different part of the museum that runs throughout - history, culture, something I forgot, and finally gift shop. You may think that having a gift shop at the very top of a building of significant cultural importance is not suitable, but this is Japan, and damned if I'm not buying my Nagoya Castle Hello Kitty keychain.

It's hard to spot in that photo, but at the very top of the castle there are two golden whales. They are the symbol of Nagoya, and they are very cool. As I understand it, the closer one in that photo is male, and the other one is female. There was an opportunity to buy a cuddly dolphin toy, and I came this close to doing so, before remembering our flat is far too small for an aquarium.

The castle gardens, as with all gardens in this country, were immaculate. I love gardens and often get accused of taking too many photos of them. Personally I don't think I take enough. I took about sixty this time. Oh come on, that's not many…

I believe it was Crowded House who gave the advice to "always take the weather with you". I am going to have Crowded House moved into an incredibly crowded hole in the ground soon because about twenty minutes after I arrived the British weather finally caught up and it started raining. Looking on the bright side, we decided to head back into Nagoya, where I tried some traditional food of the area, which was basically a big slab of meat over some noodles and soup. No complaints here.

I'm aware this update is quite short, but I am going to do Disneyland  next I think, then Nagoya part 2. This is partly to keep your interest and partly because it takes ages to recolour thousands of photos of Japanese gardens…

I will leave you today with a photo taken from the top of the castle. It's got lots of green in it because, as I believe we've established about a thousand times now, taking photos of gardens makes me all happy. More photos are available on the photosite as ever.