With Pipe, a thai second round SpaceMaster, I did go to visit Masaki (also SpaceMaster 2nd round, and recent PhD graduate from the ISSL, congrats!) in Nagoya. After taking the shinkansen which was uber-packed because of a public 3-day long holiday, in honor of the start of spring.

When we finally arrived in Nagoya (after seeing Fuji-san on our way there!) we had Soba lunch and started touring around. Masaki brought a friend of his, I am sorry I did forget her name, and so we were the 4 of us trying to go to the Nagoya Castle. After seeing hundreds of temples and shrines (and yeah even the Japanese sometimes have trouble distinguising) I really liked the different style of the castle (a bit like the imperial palace). The castle itself is quite massive and has a dolphin-shaped-fish with a tiger-head in gold on its roof. (yeah really =))

From there we went thru one of the bigger shopping areas (it is a lot of streets! =)) in Nagoya and ended up at a temple (hmm I am really bad with names...). After hanging around the shopping streets for a while we took the metro to Central Park and Nagoya Tower, there is also a thing called Oasis21 which is basically a very high (and shallow!) swimming pool =)

There was also a Pokemon Center in there as well as a big anime shop, but since I dunno much about both ... well anyway

We then took the train to Masaki’s hometown, Okazaki, where we went for kaiten (running) sushi, this restaurant was quite big (really really) and had a Shinkansen train that would serve you the sushi you ordered on the touchscreen, well in case you did not like the things that were passing by on the belt. :) Sooooo coool =) haha Pipe took pictures of everything we ate =)

Masaki then showed us the Inn we were staying in, a typical Japanese style one, looked awesome and Pipe and I had quite some fun getting our beds ready, oh and we had to try on our Yukata of course =). There was also a public bath (not onsen though) but quite nice and hot =)

oh and if you ever go to Japan, buy a JR Rail Pass before coming here, saves you huge money =)