I didn’t get a great night of sleep in Okayama. There was a fight on the 8th floor, probably right below me. My mom and my sister didn’t hear a thing.

My mom left on the train at 8:12AM for my aunt’s and I won’t see her for another couple of weeks. She actually got to my aunt’s before we even left Okayama. We finally broke from eating the free hotel breakfasts and found “morning sets” instead.

We wandered around the train station for a while and got on the Shinkansen for Tokyo. More bentos for us!

The trip was pretty uneventful and we got to Tokyo around 4:20PM. I didn’t do all that much before meeting an old co-worker from my Mitsubishi days, Suzuki-san, for dinner. Not much to report other than the food was good and the tiny restaurant was filled with smoke. Ugh. I don’t miss second-hand cigarette smoke.

Today we took a short train and ferry ride from Okayama to Naoshima, an island in the inland sea where there are three modern art museums and an “art house” project.

Monday is clearly not the ideal day to visit the island since most things are closed, but there is the Benesse Museum/hotel and art nearby including the famous pumpkin.

The rest of the things you can see for free are, well, things you can see for free.

The island was beautiful, and the Benesse Museum was pretty nice as well.

I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures inside the museum, but I did get a picture of a giant (dead) bee outside.

My mom was quite tired from all the walking. The bus drops you off at the bottom of a hill and the Benesse Museum is a ways up. We took a taxi back to the port and looked for a place to eat, but we settled on the cafe in the port building. It was pretty good, actually.

We got back to Okayama in the afternoon and looked for Japanese sweets. For dinner we once again tortured our poor mother by wandering aimlessly and choosing a place to eat that was near where we started. It was a pasta place and nothing of note. I do have a picture of a small crème brulée, though.

Tomorrow my mom is off for two weeks with my aunt and my sister and I are off for Tokyo. Our vacation is almost over!

I’m feeling a bit better today, but I think that’s because I was able to sleep while traveling.

There was a bit of drama at the Tokuyama Toyoko Inn before we left this morning. There were police there and it appears one of the patrons lost a drier full of clothes. The driers are TINY and it couldn’t have been that much. I would have probably cursed a blue streak and then gone to Uniqlo for new clothes, especially a tiny drier’s worth, but the guy appears to have called a half-dozen cops and the manager of the hotel instead. He looked a little off and there was a Mercedes-Benz idling outside, so I wonder if he wasn’t a gangster trying to shake down the hotel. I suppose we’ll never know.

We left Tokuyama on the Shinkansen at 10:30AM and got to Okayama at 11:30. We spent most of the day with my sister’s friend Yumi, starting with lunch at a soba restaurant.

It was kind of weird after being in the gangster hotel, but most of the guys in the restaurant appeared to be of the same ilk and were with women who were at least 25 years younger. I did not fit that pattern. However, I did take a random picture of an old train locomotive in a park.

After lunch we drove about an out to see the world’s oldest free school.

The main lecture hall with lots of people wandering through looking at empty rooms.

We took Yumi’s fancy car with the sliding side door.

We got back to Okayama to do more shopping. We had dinner at an udon restaurant.

We’re at the Toyoko Inn in Okayama (one of three near the station) and it’s a lot livelier here than it was in Tokuyama/Hikari. A LOT livelier. The bookstore (I didn’t even see a bookstore in Tokuyama) is open until midnight on Sunday night, for example. Man my family is from the sticks.

I seem to have caught a cold. Fortunately, today we were just hanging around with my aunt and cousin. My aunt and her kid look more like me than most of the rest of my family, which is kind of odd. He’s the one who my mom and aunt call ??? or “alien” because they can’t understand what he’s talking about. There were several conversations about who is more the alien between me and him.

So we went to my aunt’s house, out to lunch, and to my cousin’s house where I passed out on the couch for a while. Stupid cold anyway.

Not really sure why we had an amuse bouche of spring roll.

Sadly, the food was much better looking than it tasted.

Fancy soup.

We had some cake and headed back to the hotel in the afternoon. I figured we should try going to the mall to find some dinner, and took a taxi. We were trying to choose between “Rock Town” and “Youme Town” and the taxi driver suggested Rock Town had more restaurants.

It was an odd mall that looked more like something in the U.S. than something in Japan. And it only had six restaurants on the mall map, and it looked like one of them was closed. It was a bit of a disappointment and so I talked to a couple of BMW salesmen who were showing cars at the mall. They told me there wasn’t much choice in the area and suggested we go to Mr. Bark, a Japanese steak & hamburger restaurant.

It was the Japanese version of an American restaurant and it wasn’t that bad. The bib is because everything comes on a hot plate and is sizzling and spattering.

So that was the day and another travel day tomorrow. Off to Okayama.

Holy crap it’s a long ways to Nagasaki. Today was a travel day and the first part was on the train from Nagasaki to Hakata.

We had a weird compartment on the train. It didn’t shut, but it did have a little cramped area for us to sit in. The leg room wasn’t ideal.

We saw some inexplicable views of the ocean, like the poles in the water.

Also, they tend to beach their boats for some reason.

And they stop at stations with ham radio antennas for no reason (actually the reason is that there is a single track for much of the trip and the trains can only pass each other at the stations.)

We had a SIX HOUR layover in Hakata, because my mom doesn’t like riding the Shinkansen that stops at every station. Don’t ask me. We could have been in Tokuyama much earlier. The food was pretty good, though.

We spent a lot of time wandering through a department store and then having dessert to have a place to sit down.

We also got massages and then got on the train to Tokuyama. Tokuyama is the shinkansen station closest to my aunt’s house and is quite depressing. What used to be a bustling little town is now a ghost town. This is happening all over Japan as the arcades move to the malls. The only restaurants we could find were drinking establishments and though the food was actually pretty good the fact that it was the only sort of business open was really pretty depressing. Next time we’re going to find the nearest mall and eat in a restaurant there.

OK, so I thought someone was running some sort of engine outside or trying to start a chainsaw for the last hour. It turns out it was the guy snoring in the next room. Tokuyama is turning into a kind of nightmare for me. At least we get to see another cousin and my aunt.

Before I start talking about my day, I am going to complain about my hotel room. I’m right next to the elevator and here’s my view.

The video-on-demand was also spotty and when I tried to watch Harry Potter or Sucker Punch, it just stuttered. I was tempted to see if it stuttered on the pr0n as well, since that’s probably what most people watch on it, but I figured I had better things to do with my time, like try to sleep. Fortunately, the room is fairly quiet, and the elevators are not noticeable.

We spent the day walking around Nagasaki with my sister’s online friend Jan. Jan’s been here for 20 years but she hadn’t been to the Museum of the 26 Martyrs for almost 18. We talked her into going in with us. It’s a serious Catholic museum, but heathen me found it to be a celebration of the ridding of Xtians. My sister wanted to see pictures of the Xtians hung upside-down over pools of excrement and my brother-in-law was curious about the practice of trodding on iconography. (They’d let the Xtians go free if they would step on religious images.) There were drawings of both, and also the casting of Xtians into the boiling volcanic pools. It must have happened; at least 26 of them were recognized by the Pope after all.

Across from this image was a giant root and a plaque that, paraphrased, read: “This is a camphor root that has nothing to do with the 26 martyrs, but it’s interesting nevertheless.” We also saw some kids hanging out in the corner of the green space in front of the museum and didn’t have any idea what they were doing until they broke out some dance moves.

After that we walked to downtown Nagasaki for which I have some quick observations:

1. Nagasaki is smaller than I thought.
2. Nagasaki is hilly as hell.
3. They sure like their stairs in Nagasaki (probably because they’re used to walking up and down the hills).

Of course we did the touristy thing by seeing the meganebashi.

But a few steps away was the shopping arcade which was much livelier than most I’ve seen in Japan. The arcades seem to be closing in favor of the giant malls. I like the arcades better a lot of the time.

And, of course, lunch in a traditional and busy Nagasaki restaurant.

Jan left us after lunch and we continued on to Dejima, which was a small artificial island that was Japan’s only contact with the outside world for a time. The buildings behind the re-creation of Dejima shows how much more land has been reclaimed since that time. What was harbor is just land now.

We were pretty tired, and after a bit of rest we continued on to an Indian restaurant named Milan. I guess it means something else in the dialect of the chefs.

So my sister threatened to make me buy her an outfit if I didn’t start spending money. I bought a plastic “shitajiki” (just a thin piece of plastic you put under paper notebook pages so you don’t have to push against all the other pages) but she said ¥105 didn’t count. I then got a membership to the hotel chain we’re staying in, Toyoko Inn, for ¥1500, but she said that didn’t count. I did finally get off the hook by buying a t-shirt for ¥3800. I’m not converting that into dollars, because it hurts too much. Plus, you can’t get a t-shirt from a traditional Nagasaki shochu company for any less.

Today we traveled from Osaka to Nagasaki. My mom and my sister have been to Nagasaki in the past, but I haven’t. Most of the day was spent on the train where we did have some nice bentos on the way.

My aunt got off on the way, at Hiroshima, and we had to change trains at Hakata but it was mostly uneventful. We’re not sure if my aunt actually made it home, because she doesn’t like to answer her telephone. It was raining when we got to Nagasaki and the hotel was a few minutes walking from the train station. Dinner was another five minutes walk. Nothing is as close in the country as it is in the city, is it? But we wandered around another Japanese mall and found a place that had Nagasaki chanpon.

There weren’t many people in the restaurant and we were surprised at how good it was.

Tomorrow we’re going to wander around some of the places the white devils, I mean, foreign influences are in the city but not the big influence that went off in 1945. I’ve been to the Hiroshima atomic bomb memorial museum and I don’t need to see another one. Instead, I’m trying to find where they hung the Xtians upside-down over pools of excrement before they just plain gave up torturing all the converts. But now that I think of it, isn’t it just like America to drop an atomic bomb on the most Xtian city in Japan?

I’m totally failing at stimulating the Japanese economy. In fact, the only thing I think I bought today was another can of beer. I have seriously thought about buying a USB hub and a foldable Bluetooth keyboard, but those aren’t that expensive. I also not-so-seriously thought about buying my dream watch, a Grand Seiko with a 24-hour hand, but at today’s exchange rate it’s about $6,600 or probably the same as my car is worth. If I get a big raise I may go for it, but that’s about as likely as winning the lottery right now. I suppose it’s just as well; it didn’t have exactly the band I wanted and for ¥462,000 I should have the band I want.

Today we visited my uncle and my cousins in Nishinomiya and that was fun as always aside from a slight disaster where my mom dropped her wallet in the taxi and didn’t notice it until the taxi left. My cousin and I rode bicycles back to the train station and told them our plight, but didn’t tell them we had an incredibly unfriendly taxi driver. Most of the drivers got out of their cabs to help us, but we didn’t notice that the guy at the head of the line did not. The next passenger getting into that cab found my mom’s wallet and, being Japan, we got it back intact. But it was because of the passenger, not the driver.

My sister and I did some more shopping (with the previously noted failure on my part) and we all went out to dinner. We found the “coffee shop” that we used to frequent in a different spot on the 14th floor of the Daimaru building and we had two of the specials and one sandwich set. The cakes there are tasty as well. Last year we had a surprisingly good stew there.

Tomorrow we’re off to Nagasaki. We couldn’t get on the train we wanted because it was full, but we’re getting there in the late afternoon. I’m not sure what’s in Nagasaki since I’ve never been, but apparently there’s an area where the Japanese used to torture whitey in the olden days. I’m all for that.