Nagoya, Here I Come.

I planned a trip to Nagoya this weekend and, like all things in life, it ended up being quite a difficult thing. Japan has a ton of random national holidays. They usually fall on random tuesdays or thursdays but sometimes line up nicely. Every year they have 'Golden Week' where vacations line up for a few days in a row so there is a 5 or 6 day weekend in May. This year we have GOlden week and the mighty and rare 'Silver Week' which is a series of holidays in September. Golden Week occurs every year, but SILVER week. That is a rarity. I took this as a cue to get out of town for a few days. I wouldn't have to use my paid vacation hours from work... it'd be great. My first choice for a desitnation is my old friend Nagoya. I studied there for 5 months, it's where this here blog STARTED. Anyway, I found a hotel to crash at with Hilary and reserved it. We had to do it early, though, these Golden and Silver weeks are travel heavy times.

I looked up Bullet Train tickets. It appeared it would be 9000 yen each way. Which is about 90 dollars. I say it 'appeared' this way because when I went to buy them at the station it rang up around 70,000 yen (700 dollars) for both tickets round trip. Surely the tickets weren't 35,000 yen round trip (350 dollars... have you figured it out yet? just remove two zeros and it's dollars) I didn't buy them. We did more searching. There are cheap highway buses but they are all booked up. What could I possibly do? Car.

I am not too worried, the highways here aren't that difficult. The most annoying part is the tolls. To drive from Niigata to Nagoya takes about 5 hours and costs 9000 yen in tolls. Yes, 90 dollars. Each way. My mom drives 4 hours from Michigan to Chicago from time to time and I think it costs like 4 bucks?

Anyway, it's time for my first major Japanese road trip. I hope I get to see cool things like Japan's largest ball of yarn or Japan's largest pair of chop sticks along the way...