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.