Nagoya

I arranged my schedule so that I cranked through the consults in 1.5 days. It's good training for civilian practice!  After the morning, I headed up to Nagoya to meet up with SMS. He had left the day prior to go check out Bunny Island. He has sent me some truly scary pictures (this is tongue-in-cheek. The rabbits are very cute but I'm a big chicken when it comes to lots of animals). He spent the night at the Bunny Hotel and then headed up to Nagoya.

On Monday night, I went out to Yuzu, my favorite restaurant in Iwakuni. Since I was by myself, I got the miso eggplant and the salt-crusted grilled fish. Yum!  Other than my Yuzu visit, my Iwakuni trip was pretty uneventful. 

Can't stop, won't stop!  51st floor bound!

I headed up to Nagoya late Tuesday morning and got there too late to go to the Miso Factory.  We met up at our little hotel near the station and headed out to check out the town. First, we headed over to the station to check out the view from the Cafe de Ciel on the 52nd floor. It had a great view of the building SMS wanted to photograph, which was the main reason we were in Nagoya. It was pretty foggy though, so we headed over to the Nagoya branch of the Boston Museum of Fine Art. It was closed though. It was the first day of transitioning between special exhibits so we were out of luck. Boo!  Well, SMS was kind of ok with it but I was le sad for about 5 seconds before switching gears and thinking about dinner!

Spiral building, shrouded in fog

Nagoya has a LOT of regional specialties and food aficionados. I decided I wanted to try hitsumaboshi, rice with small pieces of eel.  Basically, it's a variation on serving unagi.  The recommended place was Horaiken. The surrounding area of Sakae was very cool to walk through and we entered the Matsuzakaya department store and headed to 10F. Long(ish) story short, we were in the central building and not south. It took us a bit to figure it out and make our way to the right place. Well, strictly speaking, SMS figured it out while I was having a quiet meltdown trying out to figure out "Why was the jnternet betraying me with bad directions when I was so hungry?!?!"  So clearly, even more so than usual, it was good SMS was around! 

Awesome water clock in the subway station!

The eel was pretty awesome and we split a large bowl and ate a quarter at a time as directed by the eating instruction on a helpful, multilingual placard.  Then, we headed back to the main station area and scouted out SMS' photo location. It was still raining so we went back to the hotel and I fell asleep. SMS actually headed out about 2 hours later and took his photos so that was pretty awesome for him. 

Spiral building in the distance on terrible quality iPhone nocturnal panorama

The next day, I went up to Yokosuka to see a complicated post-op patient (all was well!) and then took a flight down to Fukuoka so I could get to Sasebo before my clinic on Thursday. SMS stayed longer in Nagoya and went to the Miso Factory and the MagLev museum. He said both were really cool and recommends them!