Niigata

Takayama was once again raining miserably this morning. Anyway I walked to Takayama Jinya, which was pretty interesting. The subtle aroma of the wooden buildings really added to the classiness; the house was traditional, beautiful, but not overly crowded by tourists.

It took seven hours to travel from Takayama to Niigata, although one of the hours was spent wandering in Toyama and Naoetsu stations. There were some uncivilised people in Toyama who jumped right in front of me when boarding the train.

I’m now in this dingy hotel room in Niigata. It was the cheapest I found on the internet, 3,580 yen including breakfast. The room sucks though. It’s not too tiny (I still have a little space), and there’s free wi-fi, but there’s only light in one part of the room, and the bathroom is as small as Green Hill Hotel Urban in Sannomiya (the one we stayed at during the Kobe University summer programme). The room is a bit stuffy (the heating was too warm so I just turned it off) and I can’t open the window, grrr.

The hotel is about 5 minutes walk from the JR station, which is good, but it can take longer if you’re walking with luggage. Since it was almost 2000 when I checked-in at the hotel, I didn’t have much time to explore Niigata (tomorrow I’m leaving at 0830 to go to Sendai). I walked around the station, the area reminded me of Okayama. Niigata seems to be a bigger version of the provincial town of Okayama. Obviously this is all that I know of the city; I’ve read that the sunset over the Japan Sea is quite amazing, but I didn’t have the chance to see that.

One place that caught my attention was a bookshop called Junkudo. It’s right next to the train station and it’s one of the biggest bookshop I’ve seen in Japan. Maybe not as big as the Kinokuniya in Shinjuku (with 6, 7 storeys), but at least twice the size of the Kinokuniya at Hankyu Umeda. Obviously most of the books were in Japanese, but the English books section was also pretty good; the foreign magazine racks weren’t as impressive as the one in Umeda though.

Can't wait to go to Sendai tomorrow - this hotel room is a bit of an anti-climax after two comfy nights at the ryokan in Takayama.