Japan Travel

Just a quick post before I head off to the office today. I'll see if I can flesh this out a bit later with additional details...

The past few days have been pretty exciting - conference session and meetings for work went well last week, and then on Friday evening I hopped on the Shinkansen for about two hours heading west. It was off to an awkward start, as I had to take the monorail to the commuter line to get to the main Tokyo station...and at 6pm it was literally packed. My 6 minute trip on the commuter line was an exercise in Brownian motion with my small duffel bag and backpack.

On Friday and Saturday nights I slept in Nagoya, using it as a base for sightseeing. Saturday was spent in Kyoto (a short ~ one hour Shinkansen west of Nagoya) wandering around. I was able to practice my Japanese a bit, which was cool. I visited two temples: Kiyomizu, up on the hill overlooking the city, and Ryoanji, a quieter place with a famous rock garden and fountain with a famous inscription. Lunch was an おいしい　やさい のたべもの だけ(delicious vegeterian meal) at a place recommended by the NYTimes. On Sunday I took a local train to a bus to go to Meiji Mura, a superb outdoor architectural museum. It has several Meiji-era buildings that were moved piece-by-piece and reconstructed in a huge park near a mountain lake. (Perhaps I'm missing some subtlety but I would translate the Kanji characters of the adjoining city, Inuyama, as "Dog Mountain"...) To me the star attraction was the lobby of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, which was well worth the visit.