Nagahama & Hikone

Day 249 – It’s OK, women can eat “Men’s Pocky”

Before we left the hotel we asked the hotel receptionist to book out next night’s hotel accommodation for us.  We told her it was at Mt Fuji and gave her the telephone number to ring.  After a lot of oohing and ahhing she hung up the phone and asked if we knew the place we asked her to book was on top of Mt Fuji.  We explained that we did know and assured her that we were quite capable of getting from Nagoya to the top of Mt Fuji in a day.  She didn’t seem convinced, but she rang back and made the reservation for us all the same.

First stop on today’s day trip was Nagahama, known for it’s artistic glass industry and old style shop houses around Kurokabe Square.  We spent a couple of hours wandering around the shops before having a delicious chicken and raw egg curry at a little restaurant on the main street.

Me sampling some rice crackers, shortly before buying some rice crackers and quickly eating a whole packet of rice crackers (good breakfasts are hard to come by in Japan).

Some of the arty glass stuff.

After lunch we got back on the train and headed to Hikone, famous for its 16th Century castle which is considered (apparently) to be one of the finest in Japan.  On the train we accidentally befriended a rather strange man who kept unsubtly taking photos of Erin with his mobile phone, weird.  Thankfully he got off after only a few stops.

When we got off the train it was the middle of the afternoon, stinking hot, with not a cloud in the sky.  We hopped from shade patch to shade patch as we headed toward the castle.  The first thing we had to do when we got there was climb a lengthy set of stairs (thankfully in the shade) and then cross a drawbridge (cool!).

 
In the garden there was a guy playing a lute type thing, he was quite good.

Genkyu-en, the nice gardens to one side of the palace.

On the way back to Nagoya we were in a bit of a hurry to change trains at Maibara (due to a late train, my goodness such things don’t happen in Japan do they?) and accidentally ended up on the Shinkansen heading the opposite direction back toward Kyoto.  Luckily Erin realised at the last minute and we jumped off just before it pulled away from the platform.  It did however mean that we had missed our train going the other direction.

Erin used the time waiting for the next train to do some blogging and sample “Men’s Pocky”.  Shouko later assured us that it was acceptable for women to eat Men’s Pocky, so Erin had needlessly made me go to the convenience store counter to buy it for her!

For dinner we headed back to the same Okonomiyaki restaurant, this time opting for the two person set menu, which included an interesting concoction called Monjyayaki.  Essentially they cover the hotplate in finely chopped veggies and seafood, and when they are cooked pour this soupy stuff over it and mix it all together.  To eat it you use a little spatula to scoop up the veggies and seafood which are now covered in this slightly thickened soup.  Yum.  The set menu ended with some green tea ice cream.  Yum again.

Nagoya

Day 247 – Chubbie men wear nappies

General admission tickets to the Sumo tournament are only sold on the day and we’d heard that they could be difficult to get, so we were up early to walk across Nagoya to the stadium to get in line.  There was a line when we got there but it wasn’t huge, so we soon had our tickets.  Excited we headed inside to wait for the bouts to begin.  They start quite early in the morning, around 8:30am, with the junior divisions.  At this stage the stadium was still quite empty (the vast majority of the seat are reserved, so there is no need to turn up early to get a good spot).  We watched the juniors for about an hour before deciding that eight hours of sumo was going to be too much.  So we walked back to our hotel for a morning nap.

Empty stadium early in the day.

After our nap and a quick noodle lunch we were back in our seats watching the bigger boys battle it out.  We had a few surprises, the bouts only go for less than a minute in general, and they only fight one bout per day (the tournament goes for 12 days), so each fight is over much quicker than we thought.  This means that much of the time is taken up with rituals, feet stomping, salt slinging and false starts to put the other wrestler off his game.  The other surprise was that quite often the little guy (relatively speaking of course) would come out victorious, with the really big guys seeming to be more prone to lose their balance.

Waiting their turn by the side of the ring.

These moves are performed before each bout to symbolise that the wrestler has come to fight in good faith.

The ring is elevated which made for some spectacular falls.

I know whose shoes (or bare feet) I wouldn’t want to be in right now.

Mid-afternoon the Juryo division (2nd division) started and the crowd got a bit livelier, by the the time the Makuuchi division (1st) came on late in the afternoon the stadium was much fuller and the cheering more enthusiastic, especially for some obvious crowd favourites.

Before the beginning of the upper division matches a ‘dohyo-iri’ (entering the ring) ceremony is performed.  The wrestlers enter the stadium wearing ceremonial ‘kesho-mawashi’ embroidered silk aprons worth up to A$10,000.

Unsuccessfully trying to interpret the form guide, which is of course written in Japanese as Erin and I bet with each other on each match (she was 6 up in the end).

We can’t possibly imagine how somebody in McDonalds’ marketing department though this was a good idea!

When the sumo was over we headed for another sushi train, it’s fair to say we’re becoming addicted.  This restaurant belonged to same chain as the one in Kyoto with the ‘shinkansen’, so I once again amused myself ordering dishes off the touch-screen menu so that the special train would come and deliver them to our table.