When I arrived home from Japan and was feeling pretty funky the next day, my dad said he read that it takes one day to recover for every hour difference in time zones... and I rather enjoyed the idea of milking my jet lag excuse for 13 days. But at this point, any difficulty getting out of bed in the morning only be chalked up to laziness, and I have
finally gone through all of my photos from the trip. A few highlights:
The ubiquitous plastic food samples in restaurant front windows helped us decide where to eat...
A typical sight once we got inside a restaurant - serious menu studying, trying to guess what exactly might be in the dishes. Picture menus are handy when you don't know the language, but you still don't know exactly what you might be getting (I think a piece of chicken liver entered my mouth at one point. Blech).
View from my hotel room at night. With all these lights, sometimes I felt like I was just in any big city - though sometimes it felt like a different universe... those cultural differences are for real.
Observation deck on top of bus station/shopping center (because everything seemed to double as a shopping center), which I think really was called the Aqua Spaceship, but the next one (taken inside the elevator) is still really funny.
The last day, I went to the Nagoya City Art Museum and the Noritake porcelain museum/factory. The old factory kiln walls were kind of cool and made into a little park (below). The museum was interesting - I'm not so into the frilly porcelain designs, but they had some amazing art deco and art nouveau era pieces, including one set designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. No photos allowed indoors though...
The museum had a Calder sculpture in front.
And a few colorful details:
Cool wall outside of the conference center.
Origami strands outside of a shrine.
We went to an orchid garden on one of the days off.
