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Nagoya, Japan
If you're scared or tired of what you're scared of, then why should you stay
The pictures start where I started, if you don't count the flight or the airport or the N'EX train or the Hikari Shinkansen. This is the concourse of the JR (Japan Rail) Nagoya Station in Nagoya, Japan- an hour and 40 minutes (by bullet train) west of Shinagawa, where crowds scurry back and forth and underneath an all powerful George Clooney. All hail the mighty George.
This picture (for those who notice such things) was taken with my iPhone 4 using an app called Pro HDR, a program that takes two quick pictures in succession and then instantly (or rather almost instantly) merges them together to create optimal exposure and (somewhat intentionally) often creates fun effects and (somewhat unintentionally) often creates images just out of focus. My iPhone was one of three cameras (including my overused Canon S90 point and shoot and my still beloved Canon 20D dSLR) I dragged with me halfway around the world just to take pictures that I could then repackage as this slideshow just for you. Yes, as always, it's all about you.
I really did not do all that much in Nagoya, not that there's all that much to do in Nagoya anyway. It's not a big tourist town but that's not why I was staying there. Nagoya was an especially convenient base for me to get to Inuyama, another not big tourist town, but more about that on the next page.
Even though there wasn't all that much to do in Nagoya, there was at least something to see. The Mode Gakuen Spiral Tower (by a Japanese firm named Nikken Sekkei) is actually a school, or more accurately three schools (fashion, computer and medical). A shiny glass building towering and twisting under a perfect late twilight blue sky, and easily the most interesting (non Toyota related) thing to see in Nagoya.
I'm intentionally starting this slideshow slowly, part of a trip that (for that first 34 hour day) started off pretty damn slow. Still even when things go slowly it doesn't mean that it has to be all that slow. This is a screen capture from an iPhone HD video that I took on the bullet train between two cities (with a cameo from a far away, semi obscured Mt Fuji) that you will see later in the slideshow, chronological order (as always) be damned.
As you likely already know and or realize, I am lucky enough to travel for work a lot, and most of the time I travel it is on Continental Airlines or one of its many affiliates. And if you travel enough there eventually are rewards- things like occasional upgrades, lounge access and free flights. My flight to Japan (or to be more accurate my flights to Japan) was in fact free, although even free has its drawbacks. To get the free flight to Tokyo, I was routed from Newark to Toronto and then direct from Toronto's always wonderful Pearson International Airport right to Narita, only a short 13 hours and 10 minutes away.
The flight from YYZ (Toronto Pearson) to NRT (Tokyo Narita) is designated as Air Canada Flight #1, a flagship direct 777 route that doesn't quite go over the north pole but comes pretty damn close. This is the north side view of the Arctic Ocean this past November, somewhere well north of Alaska, well above the Arctic Circle and easily the farthest north I have ever been. What is most impressive about this eternal twilight view to me is that it contains no clouds. All of the blurry white that you are seeing is distant snow and ice some 40,000 feet below. And any lines you see (and there are some there) are cracks in the ice, or at least in the snow.
