That same night…
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 in: News, Travel
After our climbing adventure Ryan had to head home for dinner, which left Conrad and I with nothing to do for the rest of the evening. A voracious reader, he’d been reading a fantasy series, almost ready to move on to the next book, but it’s hard to get ahold of English novels around these parts. We checked the large bookstore in Nagoya station to no avail, so we found some chairs outside a fancy cafe to flip through his Lonely Planet guide. Inside the building was so warm, we soon found ourselves stripping off layers of clothing. I believe the only thing preventing people from coming out to tell us to leave was our rough-and-tumble appearance. Conrad is a beast, and I hadn’t shaved since I arrived in Japan two weeks ago.
We found some other bookstores in the Guide, and I also caught a glimpse of a really interesting Shrine that hosts one of three national treasures that were supposedly passed down to the first emperor of Japan by the goddess Amateratsu herself (in this case, it’s a sword). Only the emperor himself gets to see these artifacts, which is probably for the best; chances are, the objects in my imagination are way cooler than they look in reality. We took a subway to Jingu-mae, which I first thought would lead us to a bookstore and then a park in which we could drink the bottle of wine Conrad had brought with him from Ise, but then I realized I had subconsciously chosen the train station for Shrine instead. We shrugged it off and found that the entrance to the large park surrounding the shrine was right outside the station. Fortune had shined her smiling face upon us once again.
We briefly visited the shrine, but were far more impressed with the Cypress and Camphor trees, many of which had been raised by monks over a thousand years ago. The biggest tree in the park was an enormous camphor, lovingly surrounded by a fence a wrapped in a decorative ceremonial rope. Nearby was a large storage of rice wine; the significance of that escaped me, but who am I to argue?
We found our way to another station to take us near Sakae, more in the downtown area of Nagoya, to continue our search for a good bookstore. We found ourselves in a very fancy shopping mall, walking around the Rolex and Montblanc stores, pretending we were the kind of people to drop $15K on an accessory. Eventually we found out we were in the wrong building (as if we didn’t already know) and found the Maruzen down the street, which fortunately had the books we were seeking.
On our way back to the station, we stopped so Conrad could get a photo with one of the poor girls handing out tissue packets, advertising what looks like “full release” massages. She was dressed in a kigurumi (stuffed animal suit), which was the main reason Conrad wanted the photo. Immediately thereafter, an American approached us and asked if we knew where the Hub was.
Wait, did he just said, “the Hub….?”
Three years ago, the Hub was my main bar back in Takadanobaba, near the school. A western-style pub, it caters mostly to the foreign crowd, but is also popular amongst Japanese people too. I knew it was a chain, but I didn’t know there was one in Nagoya. We must find it!!
It took a bit of walking and a lot of asking, but we finally found the hub, and our night began. We took a seat next to an Iranian whose name I can’t remember or pronounce, but he had lived and worked in Japan for over a decade. His English wasn’t very good, so we ended up conversing in Japanese for most of the evening. After a while, his Jamaican friend Bryan showed up, and that led to some more interesting conversation. A lot of drinks were passed around, and my evening began to deteriorate into a collection of memories fit for a bullet list:
- drinking TARANTULAS (omg I missed that drink)
- Trying to get Tyler a date
- Trying to convince people to go to late-night karaoke
- Arm wrestling a former world champion, failing miserably
- Hanging out with some randoms, convincing them to come to karaoke
- Actually being able to sing “One more time, one more chance” by Masayoshi Yamazaki by reading the lyrics
- Getting treated to some delicious 3am Ramen at Ichiran, laughing at all the other drunk people
- Waving goodbye to our new friends
- Realizing we never got anyone’s contact information as the cab pulls away
- Wandering around looking for a manga cafe or some place comfortable to sleep for a couple hours
- Settling on McDonalds
- Waking up to the sound of Spanish backwards
- Realizing we were surrounded by Brazilians.
- Catching an early train back home, actually making it to bed in one piece at 7:30am
- spending the entirety of the following day in bed, realizing that “I’m too old for this shit”
- Feeling great on Monday, ready to do it all over again!
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