Nagoya - 名古屋

Golden Week during Japan is one of the busiest times for travel. During a week in late April to early May, Japanese workers get time off to celebrate the several back to back holidays. You can read more about what each day celebrates here. During Golden Week, I didn't have to go into lab Thursday and Friday. A few weeks before I had heard of this event up in Nagoya called the Winter Illumination. From the pictures it looked very beautiful : the main attraction being this arch of golden lights that you could walk under. I decided to take a day to travel there and back.

Nagoya is pretty much in between Osaka and Tokyo. There are a couple ways of getting there, including the overnight bus, car, or shinkansen (bullet train). Since I only wanted to go for a day I decided to take the shinkansen. By taking the trains and shinkansen, the travel time one way was about 2 hours (which doesn't seem like much but I only spent 30 minutes on the shinkansen and the rest of the time I had to transfer between trains). Since the actual lighting didn't happen until about 7PM, I had a couple of hours to go wherever within the city. At first I walked to Nagoya Castle, but since it was a vacation week for Japanese, the line just to get your ticket was ridiculously long so I decided not to wait in the heat. I visited one of the major shopping arcades in Nagoya and went to a huge mall with over 10 floors. I decided to walk since everything was relatively close together, but since I kept Google Maps open most of the time my phone was dying and I needed my phone to stay alive to take pictures of the illumination! So I decided to wait the rest of the time in a Starbucks, since there are outlets there for people to use (and also because it was raining outside).

Getting to the Winter Illumination, you needed to take a train to a small island. Since this was the last weekend of the event the train was packed, as well as the bus you needed to take from the train station to the event (this is where I realized the downside of not having a car). Once I got there the entrance fee was about ¥2300, but this included a ¥1000 coupon to use at any shop in the area. This little theme park was pretty big with lots of flowers to look at and take pictures of. There was even a little lift that would take you up so you could get an aerial view of the surrounding area (and the lift was shaped like Mt. Fuji!).

Mt. Fuji shaped lift

The arch that would be illuminated was closed off, but there was already a huge crowd waiting in front of it to see the lighting. They lit the arch right at 7 (there was even a countdown that started at 6:59:50 ahahah). After you walked through the arch, they had a little light show in the back with one of Japan's childhood characters Kumamon. Then to get back to the main area, there was an arch with small (fake) cherry blossoms with lights in the center. This once actually changed colors from pink to light green to dark green.

By the time I left the park and was able to catch a bus (after waiting in yet another long line), I got back to the station around 10 PM and luckily caught a train right on time (I would've had to wait another hour for the next one). Overall it was a good day, but I wish I could've stayed overnight so I didn't have to rush to get back. I decided to only do one day partly because the tickets from Osaka to Nagoya were about $70 one way. Transportation wise, it was a pretty expensive day (total of >$150 since I took other trains/buses...yikes), so I didn't want to pay for a capsule hotel/hostel. The event itself was beautiful, not only the arch but also the flowers on the grounds.