I flew to Nagoya, Japan, Friday May 2 to meet and join a Taiwan tour group there. I waited for 3 hours and in the meantime, I took a tour of the sky deck and ordered a simple Japanese lunch with awkward pointing, hand gestures, and broken Japanese. It was my first trip to Japan. It was a bit weird since the trip was not to Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto. I started to have my first impressions of Japan from the mountainous region of Japan near Nagoya. It was a not-so-rushed trip that ended with a good hot springs overnight stay. I picked out 5 pictures to go with my top 5 impressions. These days I have blogging in mind when I take pictures ;-). The tour ended late Tuesday May 6, so I stayed at a Comfort Inn next to the airport to catch an Air China flight back the next day.
[Left-Sided Society]
People walk on the left side and pass from the right. I noticed this first in the airport. This tendency became quite noticeable later. Here is the tour bus I rode in for this trip. You boarded from the left and the driver sat on the right. I was on the right side of the bus, and watching cars and buses whizzing by from the right took a day to get used to. I still walked on the wrong side of the street towards the end of the trip.
[Japanese Bicycles]
There are certainly not as many bicycles as compared to China. But there are some and they are truly used for transportation, not limited to mostly sports in the States.
The bicycles are quite sturdy in construction and relative well maintained. The most nostalgic part for me is the small headlamp next to the front wheel, which you can flip to clip on the tire, and power it while you are propelling yourself in the evening. I don't see these too often nowadays in the US or in China.
[Bring Your Own Trash Home]
I am favorably impressed with the cleanness of the places I went - service plazas along the highway, city streets, national parks, and country train stations, to name just a few. Things are orderly and people are genuinely courteous. I bought a few apples as I usually do in all my trips for added vegetable and fruit regiments. A good-sized sweet crunchy apple cost me about $1 each. I had to absorb my own sticker shock.
I skipped a small banana, which cost about $1.50. I would get my potassium later in Beijing, I thought.
At one point in a national park in the mountains, I was annoyed at not easily finding garbage cans. And then I realized that it is a recommended practice to take your trash home, as witnessed by this information/guide near the park entrance. I suppose this is the ultimate goal to deal with trash generated by the tourists. I am impressed. Obviously this works for the most part, since the surrounding is fairly clean. I took mine to the hotel for disposals.
[Wedding Chapel for Rent]
I guess that the wedding business is also big in Japan. In Beijing, you see package deals for newlywed photos in the shopping malls, and you wonder how young people can afford to do all this without going broke.
In this wedding chapel that is built next to the hotel where I stayed, there is a very small area for the worship crowd, just enough for picture-taking. I suppose that in Japan, you don't need to go to the real church to find a time slot if you wish to have a "Western-style" ceremony included. This could be a profitable business idea in China. Call a priest-like justice of the peace to witness your wedding in this hotel-owned chapel next time you are thinking about getting married.
[High-Tech Toilet]
What's in a toilet, you think? As long as it is functional and clean, I would not ask for more. Four out of the five hotels I stayed in had the kind of "warmer/shower toilet" shown here. You can program it to warm your butt ;-), and it can do two forms of water squirting (shower and bidet) at your convenience. I had to play with both to figure out the difference, since words and pictures are only clues for me. So, where are we going with the advanced toilets?
