(Sorry the translation is BADLY late...) I'm not writing this in our kitchen but home anyway. During the trip I didn't really have any time to use computer and even we've been home since 18th July I was lazy and I didn't upload the photos anywhere until now. That's what happens when you're on holiday. The amount of pics is quite big (eheh!) but if it's not exhausting to go through all of them go here.

Originally I thought that I'll write everything at once and make a huge update but it would take forever to do that. Then I thought that I'll just write these Japan stories in nice short flashbacks among everything else.

Wednesday 3.6.2009
The flight left from Helsinki-Vantaa at about 5 pm. We were told that the flight will take 9 hours and 10 minutes. Quite precise I'd say. :D I don't know if the reason is that it was my first flight or what, but those 9 hours didn't feel long at all. It didn't even go to sleeping. I slept only 4 hours, which is not much for someone who usually sleeps 8,5 hours every night...

Thursday 4.5.2009
As soon as I stepped out of the plane I felt the humidity of the air. It almost hit my face right outside the door. How is it even possible to have that much water in the air? The international airport in Nagoya was (for some reason) bigger than the airport in Finland. Even there would have been space for lots of people it wasn't crowded. It was fun to ride those "human conveyors" or "escalators on floor". Whatever you want to call them.

From a train station that was right next to the airport we took a train to our hotel. Neither in the other end we had to walk much. The hotel could be seen from the station entrance. It was too early to go into our rooms so we only left our bags and other stuff we didn't need to the reception. Then kind of tired we all went to search for a place to have something to eat. Still it was too early that more than a few places would have been open. verything seemed to open at 10 am or later and the time wasn't even 9 am. After walking a few kilometers we finally managed to find a restaurant that was open. It served ordinary Japanese food. I thought it might be small average size, but later I noticed that when talking about the the amount of tables or size of the places it was the biggest of those where we ate. :D In the beginning the staff was worried because they didn't have forks and knives for western people but the one Japanese-speaking person from our group told them that we didn't need them. Oh yeah, for the surprise of the staff a bit stupid looking western people could eat with chopsticks.

After we had eaten we still had plenty of time to hang around before going back to hotel. Near us was a park that surrounded a temple, so we went there. It was also possible to get to the "inner yard" of that temple, because of some kind of reconstruction work going on there. Otherwise it would have been a forbidden area so this was a "once in 200 years" type of opportunity. Some kind of festival would be taking place the following days in the temple are and people were building small stands on both sides of the many walking routes of the park. Because of this and rather large amount of trees my tired head wasn't 100% sure of the direction we were going but I didn't let it disturb me. We were moving in one group anyway. Before returning to hotel we bought some kind of advice for our future written on a piece of paper. If the future on the paper seemed bad it was hung up to a string outside the temple. Then some of the gods (also mentioned in that paper) would take the bad luck away. "A good paper" you could keep if you wanted.

A walking route in the park
Pigeons
A place for washing hands when coming to the temple area

We were back to hotel after noon. Our rooms were in 24th floor and the elevator ride locked my ears. The smell in the room was a bit strange (lets say almost like an old ashtray) but the view that we had from the heights made it more bearable.

Paivällä
Päivällä 2
Illalla
Illalla 2

In the evening I was too tired to care about anything except a light above our bed. The lightswitch was in such a strange place that I with my Finnish brains couldn't figure it out. We had to leave the light on.

Friday 5.6.2009

The first "real" day, for which we had made some plans. More or less disturbed by the time diference we splitted into two smaller groups. Those would be the groups for almost the whole trip. Before noon we did quickly some shopping to get some important items for that day. An umbrella was one thing we really needed that day. Everything needed to be done by using sign language, but after and our we had all we needed.

A bit before noon we started going through the samurai castle of Nagoya. During the World War 2 it had been almost completely destroyed but it had been rebuilt after that. The inside had also been changed to a museum. We could have spent almost the whole day there, but we tried to be a bit faster than that because we had some other places we wanted to visit too.

Well, we only tried. Of two spots whe tought we'd have visited that day we only managed to go to one. Another reason for that was that everything seemed to close way earlier than in Finland, so we ended up running through a fine Japanese garden in 45 mins. You can't always win...

Linnan päärakennuksen katto

Molemmat rakennukset

Sisälle rakennetun huoneen yksityiskohta

...to be comtinued