October 19th (Nagoya)

Got up, washed and went to take the bus to airport. As we waited, we bought ourselves coffee at the vending machine next to our stop. The really cool thing is that if you buy a can of coffee, it comes out hot!!! And it's not even a special machine, the same machine also serves cold bottled drinks. You can also find vending machines that sell beer on the streets :D

Hot coffee from the machine

From Trip to Japan

Our baggage checkin at Kagoshima airport was a bit complicated because, unlike the other airports (same airline...), we had to check in before scanning the baggage at security. It didn't really mater but it kind of annoyed me that the process was different for no apparent reason.

We bought Kagoshima's local dessert, "karukan", at the airport. It's a rice flour and sugar shell with different fillings (we took red bean). It's really good :)

Dessert I had bought in Yakushima but that I ate in the plane

From Trip to Japan

From Nagoya airport, we took a train to get downtown and walked about 30 minutes to get to our hotel.

From Trip to Japan

From Trip to Japan

From Trip to Japan

Another dessert I had bought in Yakushima

From Trip to Japan

Yumi, my first Japanese teacher, was supposed to meet us but her grand-mother had died just a few days earlier and the funeral was that Sunday :(

We chilled a bit in our room and then went out to eat a local dish called "misokatsudon" which basically is fried pork.

On our way there we crossed this parking tower. It's like a 20 story building and the cars are placed using that rotating platform !

From Trip to Japan

Chopsticks at the restaurant

From Trip to Japan

The street we took to get back to the hotel reminded me of Les Champs Elizes. There was a lot of high profile stores like Louis Vuitton and Addidas. In fact, the whole neighborhood had lots of shops and restaurants. It was really huge and I was impressed by it.

We made a small detour into a park

From Trip to Japan

Street lamp

From Trip to Japan

There was a store that had a Ferris wheel on it's side. I don't know why but I kinda get vertigo when I go on those things :S I still went for Nath because I'm such a nice guy :P

From Trip to Japan

From Trip to Japan

We came back to the hotel to ask the front desk clerk if she knew of any nice bars around because we wanted to drink sake. Her English was limited but she proposed that we go to a near bar called "Angel".

It ended up being a pretty empty Latin bar that specialized itself in whiskey and had no sake... I took a shochu and Nath chose a random drink that tasted like mouthwash :S

We tried to find another place for sake after but not too hard and we finally decided to call it a night.