Throwback Thursday: Aichi 2022 Itinerary

I had no expectations from Aichi. I knew nothing about the prefecture except that it’s where Nagoya, a major city in Japan, is located. The only time I started learning about it was when my friend and I were doing research of places to go there.

Little did I know that it would be an enjoyable trip, making me want to go back. Er… I just went ahead of myself. Err…

Here’s our itinerary:

Highlights

• My overall impression of Aichi was that it’s fancy. A lot of their souvenirs are in gold color.
• The ticket price at Nagoya City Science Museum was pretty cheap considering all the interactive exhibits in the museum. My favorites were the optical illusions and the machine for scanning arm veins.
• I bought real space food! I bought chocolate cake and bread in a can! I normally don’t buy novelty items, but I knew that I just had to have them.
• I love, love, love Meiji Mura! It’s a theme park that shows how it was like living in the Meiji era in Japan. The architecture, the interiors, the buses and trams, and souvenirs perfectly captured that period in Japanese history. There was also a machine that prints the headline news on the day and year you were born. I knew that I wouldn’t understand a thing, but I still spent 400 yen for the newspaper frontpage on my birthday.
• It was my first time eating lunch outside a restaurant. It was a novel idea for me, and I was glad to have tried it.
• With one hour left before Tokugawa Art Museum closed, we decided to just go for it and travel to that place. I saw that we had passed the Johnny’s Store while I was checking our current location on Google Maps. I mentioned this to my friend, and the next thing I knew, she was already applying for entry and asking for the katakana of my name. There was a new available entry slot at the Johnny’s Shop, so she grabbed the opportunity. I didn’t mind because I wasn’t sure if we’d enjoy going to a museum with less than an hour to spend looking at the exhibits.
• Speaking of Johnny’s, I had no plans of buying anything from the shop. The thing was, I suddenly found myself scanning QR codes of pictures that I would like to purchase. I did end up purchasing them. I could not resist. I bought group pics of KAT-TUN and Sexy Zone. I also bought individual pics of Kame, Nakamaru, Ueda and 2-shot with Shori and Kenty. I did buy 2 Kame pics because I was planning to give it to Jaja when I go to the Philippines this December for winter break.
• Oasis 21 was awesome! The view from the top balcony was nice, especially since you could see the sunset and the Chubu Electric Mirai Tower from there.
• The wind at the highest deck of Chubu Mirai Electric Tower was nice.
• Our last itinerary before heading back to Kagawa was the Tokugawa Art Museum and Garden. I think it’s the fanciest museum I’ve been to in Japan. There were a lot of swords and tea pots. I bought a bracelet instead of a magnet just because I liked it a lot. It looked fancy and expensive. Well, it was expensive since it costed a little more than 1,900 yen.
• The garden at the Tokugawa Museum had a separate entrance fee, but it’s definitely worth it. It’s huge and had a lot of open space.
• We wanted to go back home early, so we opted to buy bento lunchboxes to eat on the shinkansen. We were hungry that we started eating the moment we got settled on our seats. There was a point when we seemed to have remembered each other’s presence, and we just smiled to each other and went back to eating.

Not-so-highlights

• The rain! We were drenched on our first day in Nagoya. We strolled along the grounds of Nagoya Castle with our feet wet and busy protecting our bags from the rain.
• The interior of the Nagoya Castle as closed to visitors, so we just strolled along the grounds.
• The Nagoya City Science Museum would be more enjoyable if you were with kids.
• We weren’t able to wait for the planetarium show. We were so tired because of the rain and the fact that we’ve been up since 5:30 to catch the early shinkansen, so we chose to go to the hotel to have an early rest.
• Mieji Mura might be my favorite place in Aichi. We arrived there by 10am. We thought that we’d be able to leave and transfer to our next itinerary by 12:30nn. However, we found ourselves walking and discovering new places. We at least wanted to go to another one before the places close, so we left past 2pm, I think. Because of this, we were not able to explore the entire area. I want to visit this place again someday, and I’ll make sure to allot a whole day for this place.
• Continuing our desire to go to the towers in the prefectures we visit, we have decided to include Chubu Electric Mirai Tower in our itinerary. I was a bit disappointed because of the poor quality of the mirror projection. There’s also not a lot of things to do there. On the other hand, there were a lot of chairs and tables in the observatory decks. Plus, the highest level was open air. There was still ceiling and walls, but the top walls were open (with wired fences). The breeze was actually pretty nice.