On The Go – Day 6

Strictly speaking today is supposed to be traveling day. And strictly speaking on a travelling day we typically don’t do too much because we’re traveling.

I guess I should clarify.

Yes we’re on vacation. And yes vacation is in fact traveling all the time, unless it’s a stay-cation which involves not going anywhere, which is not what we’re doing in Japan.

When I say a “travelling day” in articles about our vacation, it refers to that day in the vacation where we are physically traveling from one main location to another main location.

This usually involves getting up early to catch a specific train that will take us to another specific train which hopefully if we did things right will be the bullet train that can quickly take us to this new main location so that we can begin, not relocation traveling, but vacation traveling.

And in spite of our best efforts to get an early start we usually end up in our destination location sometime late morning.

This traveling day started out a little earlier than usual because on this traveling day we got our wires crossed.

No, nothing bad…

Just that I confused the start time of the second train with the start of the first train.

So instead of needing to be at the first train at 7:15 in the morning we need it to be at the second train at 7:15 in the morning. To even further confuse the morning, we would later learn that once we got to the station for the second train we didn’t leave until 9:15, so we didn’t need to be up as early as we thought anyway.

But, no worries!

Getting to our destination early gives us more time in the day for what we want to do. And on this traveling daylike the others, we usually want to just take it easy.

This time when we arrived, we have what turns out to be the biggest room of the three places we’ve stayed so far. There’s actually room to walk around and there’s a couch near the window.

In Wakayama, where we stayed last time, there was what I will call a “shopping street”. Now granted, any street with stores on it can be considered a ‘shopping street’, but in this case, this is a dedicated street, a little narrower than a normal street, usually with a covering over the street like glass or other material. Lining the street on either side are shops, attractions and restaurants as far as the eye can see. And these are not your normal shops but usually smaller. As a result, the concentration of stores per ‘block’ are much higher.

Unfortunately, in Wakayama, there was a shopping street but there it was not as successful in keeping the attention of the locals. Most of the stores were closed, probably replaced by the ones in the nearby train station.

Nagoya, our destination today, also boasts having one of these streets. And a casual stroll through a local shopping district would be the perfect way to relax and prepare for the next adventure.

Little did I know that this day as well, would turn out to be just as adventurous as any other day so far.

Walking….

Nothing can be obtained and no destination can be reached without walking.

So we headed out to the streets of Nagoya to the shopping district.

As we approached the entrance, we were walking through an area that looked more like a small park than the rest of the city. It had a large pedestrian walkway surrounded by trees and planters and small concrete structures like you’d see in a shrine or temple area. There at the end of this space was a little shack, for lack of a better name, with a little window and shelf, similar to a ticket booth at a carnival.

In front of this booth was a young teenager standing with his arms out stretched, covered with pigeons. And frantically scurrying around the ground at his feet were well over a hundred additional pigeons, all seemingly in the middle of a feeding frenzy!

And, this poor boy…

Well, this poor boy had the biggest smile on his face; the kind that can only be found on a person having the time of their life.

That’s when, as we got closer, I noticed he was holding a little tin plate in his hand that WAS filled with small bird seed pellets that these city pigeons really seemed to like. I then also noticed the gentleman who used the small booth to sell these little plates of bird food for 100 yen a piece (about 60 cents American).

Well, 200 yen later and Amelia and I had our own little plates of bird food and were also quickly covered in eager Hungry pigeons happily feeding off of our plate and also surrounded by hungry pigeons feeding off of the pellets that fell to the ground.

I learned that pigeons don’t really have sharp claws. They just kind of tickle a little.

A block later and we were at the entrance to the shopping street.

Wow!

Now I understand why the one reviewer on Google said that it was a very pleasant sensory overload.

Imagine looking down a narrow street and seeing as far as you can see, little shops lining each side of the street of every kind you can imagine. Combine this with the smell of every imaginable Asian food and you get an idea of the experience.

There were clothing stores for women and clothing stores for men. You could get clothing for the younger generations and shops with nothing but antique clothing. They sold shoes and jewelry, they sold electronics and nick-knacks. There were stores that sold kimonos and others that sold kimonos and material to make kimono.

There were even stores called Gotcha stores. These were sometimes two-story shops filled with these little gumball machine size devices that dispensed little plastic balls filled with all kinds of small plastic and fluffy characters. These were mostly anime but also included little fluffy kitties and dogs and every little thing you could imagine.

What an experience.

Later, back at the hotel room, Amelia introduced me to the fun of looking out the window and watching as it got dark.

You could see pretty far from our 10th floor window as the lights started shutting off as the office lights slowly went dark and the apartments slowly lit up with people coming home after a long day.

And at this point, its about time to end our long but wonderful day in Japan.