Kyou wa, Peter-san wa Doko?

9th Oct 2004: Day 3-- Nagoya

Bad news… none of the hotels after our stay in Mikawa-Anjo (near Nagoya) had internet access and we were too busy over the race weekend to upload updates.

Typhoon 22 hit Suzuka on Qualifying day (Saturday) and the circuit was declared unsafe so we had to amuse ourselves in Nagoya instead.

We went to the big Tokugawa art museum and saw family heirlooms including various weaponry, fine textiles and painted scrolls telling popular stories. Other displays included series of old maps of Japan.

Next we hit the shops and I picked up a new gadget - A Sanyo MPEG-4 camera. This little marvel records good quality video onto memory cards and takes digital still pictures as well. The beauty of it is that it is extremely small and can be worn on a belt so that it is always handy for anything interesting. It also came in handy for taking pictures of maps and then using the high digital zoom to find a place and scroll the map. The same store where I bought the camera had amazing things on every floor. Even the white goods floor which should have offered no real surprises managed to astound us. There were the dishwashers for one and what looked at first like hamster cages actually turned out to be dish driers. Then there were the people "testing" the massage chairs…

The Japanese are hugely proud of their transport system, and rightly so. We could usually tell which train was the right one just by when it arrived on the platform. After the super typhoon, there were some landslides next to tracks and this caused a stoppage in the Shinkansen from Osaka to Nagoya but the rest of the time the trains ran like clockwork.