Day Eight

DAY EIGHT (06/15/08, 10:14pm)

Today was mainly a travel day. After a quick breakfast, I brought my luggage down to the lobby, checked out of my room, received some free hotel mints for filling out the evaluation form, boarded a bus to the airport, sat through a VERY turbulent flight to Osaka, took another bus to Wakayama City, and checked into our new hotel, Tokyu Inn. To give you a sense of the size of these cities, Tokyo has about 12 million people, the greater Osaka city has 8.7 million but Osaka city alone has 2.5 million, Wakayama city has 1.1 million, and Tanabe has a population of about 83,000. Long ago, the size of a city used to be measured by the bushels of rice produced there because farmers paid taxes with rice.

Our tour guide, Harumi, mentioned that rice can be harvested five times a year! As we drove from Osaka to Wakayama City, I noticed dozens of rice paddies nestled amongst relatively dense neighborhoods. Lush mountains surround the city.

On the bus ride over, Harumi sneezed and then explained a Japanese superstition about sneezing: if you sneeze once, someone is talking about you. If you sneeze twice, someone is talking ill of you. If you sneeze three times, someone loves you. If you sneeze four times, you are catching a cold. And if you sneeze five times, you better rush to a hospital. She later explained that she made up the parts about sneezing four or five times but the rest is true.

Our hotel is but a five minute walk from the Wakayama castle, a beautiful castle originally built in 1585 during the Tokugawa era but destroyed in 1945 by Allied bombing and rebuilt in 1958.

After quickly dropping off our bags in our rooms, we all met in the lobby and walked to the Wakayama castle. The inside of the castle is a museum with examples of samurai armor, weapons, and various other ancient artifacts. It started raining just as we left the castle so we did not stay for very long and we decided to skip the surrounding gardens. Instead, we headed back to our hotel for a short break before meeting with Harumi in the lobby to go to dinner at 6:00.

My room here feels like a matchbox compared to the suite I had at the Grand Prince Hotel in Akasaka. Brent jokingly said that if you had to share the room (which does have two twin beds), you would have to take turns standing up. In the shower, standing up is not even an option, at least not for anyone over six feet tall. I am just happy to have my own room, to be able to wake up at 3:00 in the morning, turn on a light, and read for an hour, to shuffle around in my yukata (a Japanese robe), and hog the Ethernet cable all for myself. One nifty amenity I discovered in this hotel is that a section of the bathroom mirror, about the size of legal paper, is heated so that it doesn’t fog up when you shower. My room also comes with a green tea-scented air freshener (very useful for masking the smell of smoke which is an inevitable smell in even the finest Japanese hotels since almost everyone smokes here).

For dinner we went to the Royal Host which is in no way royal except perhaps the fact that it is near a castle. It could best be described as the Japanese equivalent of a Denny’s. The menu offers pancakes and grilled chicken sandwiches, chocolate cake and pizza. But there were also a selection of Japanese dishes and many of the American options were not quite what you’d expect. For example, the pizza was served with a fried egg in the middle. The burger was served with fried rice patties instead of buns and there was a large slice of radish in the middle. The soda fountains served a bright green version of Fanta, perhaps melon flavored? I had a Japanese salad and a bowl of French onion soup which was quite delicious.

Well, my eyelids are becoming heavier by the minute.

Oyasuminasai! (Goodnight)