We bade farewell to Beppu after some totally necessary train station shopping, which led me to buying a strange long cat keychain that seems very popular here. I guess that’s gonna be my weird souvenir for this trip – a strange cat for every city.
Since we’re off the traveled tourist route, we have a lot of local express trains to take for us to get to Nagasaki from Beppu. One of them was a local train where you could watch the conductor do their conductin’ if you were in green car (we were!). The ride is super scenic along the coast.
Our cute train train! Was! Late! What is this?! Very rare. But we had a tight-ish connection and had to run so we didn’t miss our next one. But they’re all a vibe, so I can forgive them.
Nagasaki station is newly rebuilt, likey as part of the project to start the new bullet train service (the Kamome, or seagull) that will eventually connect Nagasaki to the rest of the bullet trains. Along with the new station, the city is touting its refresh campaign (the mascot of it is very obviously a cat) and there’s info up on streetcars and even merch in the store. (Gotta fund that refresh somehow??)
We’re staying in an apartment that’s the fourth and fifth floors of a building. I have the distinct pleasure of hauling my luggage up four flights of stairs. Yippee. Glad I haven’t bought any books yet. It’s pretty cool despite the workout, since some of the rooms on the upper level have lovely desks underneath slanted frosted lights. Very cozy.
Our first Nagasaki stop is Suwa shrine, which google warns me is “so many stairs.” This entire city is nestled in a valley so the reviews makes my buns and thighs ripe with anticipation. Google takes us a meandering way through the neighborhood which is kinda nice.
Anyway we’re greeted with a semi-steep hill and a paltry single big staircase. Who thinks this is so many stairs? Becky from the burbs? It’s like two flights, max. Have you looked at the hills here, Becky? I was expecting hundreds. I think we go up more stairs to get to our airbnb!!
But we DO happen to turn around and notice a huge amount of stairs behind us. Oh, I guess google spared us some with its navigation this time (this does NOT absolve it from previous navigational crimes, nor any of its future stupid crimes).
Suwa shrine has a huge tree (camphor maybe? there’s a lot of that, and I’ve learned the word for it now) in the middle point of the stairs, and offers a gorgeous view of the city. It was established as a part of the banning of Christianity in the 1600s, as all people were required to register at their local shrines. It also happened to survive the atomic bomb blast, while the Christian churches were obliterated. Coincidence is a truly wild beast.
It has a pretty gorgeous view over the city, and it’s just the start of sunset on this very clear day. I can’t wait to go down all these stairs (yippeeee).
If you keep going up (as I only have gone up a paltry 2 flights of stairs to get here) behind the shrine, you can pass through a ton of torii and past lots of foxes.
At the end of the trail, there’s a big tree you can hug for good fortune!
We humor the reviews for the shrine to experience “so many stairs” and take the long way down to get to dinner.
Dinner was in Chinatown – Japan’s oldest. I don’t know what day it is, but not a ton is open around dinnertime today. We find a hotel restaurant and get champon, sara udon, and mabo tofu (I pick out the beef). Champon and sara udon are both local specialties. Champon is noodles topped with seafood and vegetables and sara udon is fried noodles with toppings. I deftly pluck all vegetables out of the sauce and eat them. Delicious.
I am learning that old people and ladies who like my cat earrings are impressed by my japanese, though my vocab gets better on the daily. I befriend the older guy who is the host at the restaurant and fail to translate any of Patrick’s jokes (he is dying inside from not being able to share his jokes) (I am sorry I fail you, Patrick).
Tomorrow, exploring!
