Sylvia's Journal

Our second day in Tokyo was dreary, rainy, windy and cold. Nothing appears to be open before 10 AM  and, and since we had to get on our way to Tokyo’s other airport, Haneda, around 11 AM, we ended up spending our last vacation morning in the hotel lobby and coffee shop.

The trip to Haneda airport required one metro transfer, a short trip on a train and a longer one on the airport monorail that passed through southern Tokyo. It reminded us of Rotterdam, a giant port which has none of the refined delicacy of the Japan we are so in love with.

Nagasaki, though cool, was bathed in sunlight when we descended, a nice contrast with Tokyo. Nagasaki is draped over green hills with water everywhere. We were fantasizing about taking a road trip from south to north, one day.

Miho waited for us and guided us to the bus for the long trip into town.  We dropped off our bags at our hotel, a fancy modern looking boutique hotel wedged in between girl bars and eating places in a part of town that is dead during the day but quite lively even on school nights.

We had a beer in a café that was a novelty in 1925, a time when Nagasaki wasn’t the cosmopolitan place it is now. At the time it had, unheard of, a décor of foreign movie posters, a gramophone playing western music and home-made ice cream. Today the décor is a little tired, yellowed and dusty. Gone are the movie posters and the gramophone. It is still there but relegated to be a decorative item. The western (Christmas) music comes, now doubt from something Sony.  The place serves frikadelles, a Dutch fast food variation on the hamburger. In Nagasaki the Dutch influence here is nowhere far.

For dinner we selected shabu-shabu with the famous marbled beef, this time not from Kobe but from Nagasaki. We thought we were in fish country but apparently the beef here is prized as well. The dinner arrangement consisted of low tables but without the hole underneath so Axel and I were reminded about the Afghan meals we took sitting down, hardly able to walk afterwards.

Meals are often taken in separate rooms for privacy, created by paper sliding doors. Halfway through our meal a mother with her two school-uniformed teenagers joined our little alcove. There was much giggling after we offered ourselves up for English practice but the girls were too shy and the mother didn’t speak any English, asking Miho a thousand questions about us. When we left they had some English parting words (‘nice to meet you’) for us, accompanied by more smiles and giggles.