Leaving Nagoya

I’m writing this part a few days later from Tokyo — I had fallen in love with a certain drink while at Nagoya. I’m not sure if the first instance of the drink I had found was from Nagoya, or if it was Osaka, but from the best sleuthing I can do from my receipts and logs and pictures, it was Nagoya. Oddly, receipts occasionally omit the bought items and only give a pre-tax and post-tax total price sometimes. Kind of a useless receipt. Anyway, the drink is the Maroyaka Banana & Milk drink — there’s a Strawberry & Milk version too but I like banana milk quite a bit in general and this drink is a really nice version of it. Also cheap, I’ve seen it going for about 80 to about 120 yen or so, depending on shop. Oddly though, I haven’t been able to find it since I left Nagoya at all — I didn’t try particularly hard in Okayama, but I have been trying in Tokyo, and have been completely drawing blanks thus far in every supermarket, convenience store, and vending machine that I’ve looked at. Very weird. I had made my last plastic bottle of this drink (of four, three banana and one intermediate strawberry) my primary water bottle that I refill with hotel room water and drag along with me from place to place, just so I remember what it looks like.

Why is this here? It’s an eulogy for the drink in honour of my leaving Nagoya, in case I never find it again. Maybe I’ll make someone else go there and buy a bunch for me some day. Though upon Googling, it seems to possibly be available in Singapore and elsewhere too. Just possibly not Tokyo.

Anyway, I checked out of Osu in Nagoya and went to the city of Okayama, the capial city of Okayama Prefecture, today. There were several reasons that I had picked this little city to come to out of all the choices that I still had, and the first was this Airbnb that I had found a few days ago, at the start of the Nagoya leg of my trip, and signed up for. Two days at a rural family home with a kindly couple and their pets sounded like a good time. Just like Akira in Kyoto, this one was located far away enough from a train station that they said to let me know when I was at Okayama Station, and they would arrange to pick me up from one of the nearby local stations. Similarly, whenever I wanted to leave and explore, they’d be happy to drop me off at one of the stations. As this was a personal house, I didn’t want to disturb them too early before checkin, and I said that I would walk around Okayama a little after arriving from Nagoya before contacting them to pick me up. Before all that though, I had to actually pack up and get there.

In the morning, I had my leftover rice and curry so that I wouldn’t have to bring any of that along with me for breakfast. The curry was excellent, even though it was just a supermarket packet from a couple of days ago.

Up until this point, I had not managed to get my goshuin from the Osu Kannon Temple near my apartment yet, even though I had wandered past it a couple times already. As it was the temple that I had walked through and marvelled at when I first arrived in Nagoya, I definitely wanted to get one from here on my way out in the morning, and so I went that way. Lo and behold, I found a random handicrafts market waiiting for me when I arrived.

It was about a quarter of the size of the Heian Raku Ichi Market, the one I visited on my last day in Kyoto, and I didn’t spend a ton of time here, but I did walk through it and it was interesting to browse. Among other things, someone had a pile of something that looked like old newspapers or booklets or comics that would have interested me if I were a local living near there. Must scan and upload the world.

Anyway, I went up the stairs to the main temple to get my goshuin, which was apparently the wrong place for it as the booth up there was closed — I was pointed toward and then led down the stairs to one of the secondary buildings on the ground floor where there was a room with a couple of monk initiates in there penning goshuin for visitors who wandered in. I got mine without much fuss and then left through the market.

A little while area, I arrived back at Nagoya Station and got my usual bento to eat on the bullet train.

It was a Kurobuta Tonkatsu Mentai Ekiben, or a black pork cutlet and pollack roe train bento. Or something like that. It was about average, and way too pricey like every other ekiben I had had.

This was my first time on a Hikari train, although it was functionally identical to the Kodama train that I had taken here to Nagoya in the first place. I had an aisle seat, but I learnt that on these JR West bullet trains, as opposed to the JR East ones (Asama, Hakutaka, etc), there was only one single power outlet per seat cluster, and it was for the window seat, which meant that I didn’t have an outlet to charge my laptop or phone with since there was a guy in the window seat and he warea.as using it. I survived since the journey wasn’t that long, but I learnt the value of the window seat here, even though on airplanes and such I always pick an aisle seat where possible.