RECAP: Trip 1 Day 2

As Simon can tell you, Nagoya is a damn boring place. There's just nothing there! Honestly. It's like Birmingham. Last time I visited it, Yuka and I barely found enough places to keep us entertained and so we would not have to stare at the same spot the entire time. This time we decided to go somewhere different: Asuke. Neither of us had been there and we had no idea what to expect. It turned out we didn't need to expect anything...



A quick look at the map and we realized Asuke was ages away and we wouldn't have been able to go with my ticket, i.e. we would have had to pay extra and the Flying Spaghetti Monster knows we don't like forking out craploads of cash. So we decided to go to Ise. Let me start off by saying that Ise is very disappointing. Very disappointing if you want to see the famous shrines. Why? Because they are closed! You can throw the god or goddess some money so they will listen to your prayers (for some reason gods always love cash), but you will not see the insides of any shrine. The doors are shut and you are not even allowed to take pictures of the closed doors.



However, there are a couple of very beautiful things worth seeing in Ise. The shrine surrounding greenery is fantastic. Sure, it is ridiculously crowded in some places, but this should not stop you from looking up to see all those tall trees and down to see all those chickens. Yes, Ise sports a small free roaming chicken farm on the way to its main shrine. How I would love to feast on a holy chicken! Holy animals are usually fed better than average and treated more nicely, thus probably tasting better a lot better than your average barn yard animal. There is a lovely river running right through the shrine area and some people, although mostly kids, were bathing in it. Idiot that I am I had, of course, not brought my swimming trunks, which I dearly regretted. Being more than 30 degrees centigrade and very humid, you can probably imagine how much I wanted to bathe in a refreshing river.



Ise is also famous for its traditional old town district Okage Yoko-cho just before the main shrine grounds. It should be pointed out that by famous and traditional, I mean that there probably were traditional aspects to it once, but it is so overrun by tourists nowadays that it is hard to appreciate the beauty of the old wooden buildings. It is still worth going because of what in my opinion Japan excels at: local dishes. Yuka and I treated ourselves to a bowl of cold Ise noodles (Hiyashi Ise Udon) and for dessert Matcha snow cones (Macha Kake Aisu) with red bean paste covered rice cakes (Akafuku Mochi). The noodles are far sweeter than in most other places and a bit chewier, in a word: delicious. The snow cones did not look like they would taste of Macha very much, but Boy!, were we wrong. The snow cones were fantastically rich in slightly bitter Matcha flavor. Better even than any Matcha ice cream I have had. The rice cakes were also great. They were rather small, but covered in a thick layer of red bean paste which was outstandingly smooth and tasty. Definitely worth every single yen. It is said that quite a considerably number of people choke to death on rice cakes each year. While I haven't personally had the pleasure of death by rice cake, given their consistency and the way they stick to the back of your throat, it could very well be true.



It was around the time we finished our desserts that we decided we had seen enough tourists with parasols pass us by. We headed for Toba to see the sea. Upon arrival we found we had no time left, so could only gaze at that day's rather boring looking sea and headed back to Nagoya. On the way I recorded a time lapse video from the train.



Then we had to do something in Nagoya to prove it is not a complete waste of space on Japan's main island. So we went up some tower to see the pretty lights from above. Pretty they were, but Nagoya is flat as a pancake. Surprising given its population, but then again not really, because it is a complete waste of space. Since I get vertigo very easily, the ride in the glass elevator and the observation platform from which you can almost look completely straight down really made me feel like I was in heaven or at least on the way there. I pretended to be happy and smiled, but was really happiest when left.



For our final stop we headed to a small restaurant to eat Misokatsu, a Nagoya specialty. Basically speaking, katsu is fried pork meat wrapped in bread crumbs. Comparable to the German Schnitzel, but slightly different in taste and the meat is thicker. Miso is a traditional Japanese seasoning. We ate at a place called Yabaton. The Misokatsu was delicous, but at 1150 yen I found it slightly overpriced. However, it came with some of the best rice I have had anywhere. After that it was back to Yuka's place to prepare for an early take off the next day.

All photos from Ise and Toba can be found here.