Well, today didn’t go completely well but what can you do? It was an adventure day. I took a bus to a ferry to a train to another train. On the way I tweaked my back some more and by the time I made it to Nagasaki I was beat. I was just going to grab some dinner and then hide in my room and I heard fireworks. I had to lean over the desk so I could see out the window, but I watched a bunch of fireworks that looked about half a mile away.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Like I said, Route Inn is better than I always expect. I guess the problem is it’s kind of drab and the lobby looks like some downtown office building but the rooms are fine (if not a little dark). I got up and got some breakfast at the hotel.

It was pretty good besides the coffee. And there was one weird thing: the rice was dispensed out of a machine that looked like a big coffee machine. Push the button and rice came out. A dude next to me showed me how it worked and gave me a bowl. Without him I would’ve been lost.

I went back to my room and packed only to realize that the bus to the port didn’t come that often. And I was expecting more people at Kumamoto station but I guess Sunday morning is pretty quiet.

The whole thing was pretty easy. Not too many people on the bus ride to the port and there are two ferries that go to the same place. The faster one takes 30 minutes and costs a little more. The slower one takes about an hour I think. I forget, since I didn’t take that one.

It was a nice day and I saw what the cabbie meant about the seagulls. They were swooping in the wake of the other ferry trying to get fish.

It was hot in Shimabara and it’s a lot bigger than I expected. There’s springs that were formed after an earthquake and there’s a couple of places where they have koi in the pools by some houses. I went to see those and paid ¥400 just to sit and have some more tea.

Somehow I got roped into seeing the castle. It’s a reproduction and not even original construction but it’s the third tallest castle in Japan. And that’s when I found out that going up the stairs made my back hurt even worse. But I was already on the way up the stairs to see outside. I was in so much pain that I breezed through and didn’t take any picture. Also there were lots of traditional samurai artifacts that had Christian themes. Not my cup of tea.

The reason I went was to get some stamps on a card. They give you a postcard and if you make it to all of the stamps, they overlap to form a picture of the castle. Unfortunately, no one told me one of the stamps is at the top of the castle and I didn’t carry my card up there. I was almost in tears on the way up so there was no chance I was going up a second time. My back hurt so much that I got a cab to the train station which wasn’t very far away.

The train only came once an hour and it was a One Man Car, run like the bus. You grabbed a ticket on the way in and that determined your fare.

I pre-paid for a ticket that took me all the way to Nagasaki and transferred onto a much newer two-car train. For some reason the seats on this train were just the right height to make my back start hurting again.

By the time I made it to the hotel I was beat. I figured I’d make it out to get dinner but then I’d just watch some YouTube videos in my room. I found some toruko rice (Turkish rice) which really is thought to be a shortening of “tri-color rice” and not Turkish rice. It’s a Nagasaki specialty and I pretty much missed lunch so it tasted delicious. The store in the station had hundreds of items on the menu which were basically just different versions of toruko rice. I couldn’t go through them all so just asked what the most popular ones were. I got the hayashi rice & croquette version. You can see the croquettes under the white sauce, some spaghetti, a hamburger with some white sauce on half, and the orange at the top is some salad.

Ahd then it was time to watch videos. I’m way behind on the channels I subscribe to and in the middle of watching one of the videos I heard the fireworks. A window at the end of the hallway would’ve been a perfect place to watch, but I was already in my hotel sleepwear so I just leaned over my desk and looked out at the fireworks. It was too uncomfortable to watch the whole thing, but I did see a lot of it.

And that’s about it for the evening. Unfortunately, the room is now incredibly warm (it’s Japanese winter heating even though it was 77F today). I don’t sleep well unless it’s a little cold so we’ll see how I do. I guess I could leave the window open but we’re right near Nagasaki station and the noise would probably be worse for my sleep than the heat. Oh well.

Tomorrow it’s supposed to be awful with 1” of rain and thundershowers. I’m going to see the Atomic Bomb museum so it’s sure to be a great day.