gaijin kuma desu: Christmas in Nagoya

I basically always spend Christmas with family. However, this year that was a bit difficult. So I spent Christmas quietly in Japan. It was quite an interesting experience with some very interesting twists so it ended up being quite enjoyable.

On December 23rd, I went to a Christmas song concert at a large Catholic church (the largest parish in the city). I learned about the concert from somebody that suggested that I go to it. It was quite nice. The whole church was packed full of people. It was the first time for me to visit that church. The concert consisted of songs played on a church organ, songs sung by a large girl choir, and readings from the bible by a nun. The whole thing was very nice and lasted about 2 hours.

The choir came down in front of the altar at the end to get some well deserved applause.

The altar from the top level.

The organ:

After the concert, I went for coffee with the Japanese family that told me about the concert. After that I biked back to school. From school, I went to Sakae to buy myself a Bluray for Christmas :P. Along the way I found this:

Interested in this church, I did a little looking around. Plot tickens.... turns out that the main parish priest is Polish and there are in total 3 polish priests at that church! The whole website is in Japanese so it was a bit difficult to get information. So the next day, on Christmas Eve, I decided to go to the Christmas Eve mass at this church which was listed as joined Japanese and English. It was a very nice mass with 3 priests and a packed church. It was mainly in Japanese with one reading in English and some English commentating.

Plot thickens... It turned out that after the mass was a parish Christmas Party that the priest invited everybody to go to. I kinda hesitated but finally went there and introduced myself to the priests. Turned out that there were about 5 (+kids) polish people there that I ended up meeting and talking to. Finally, I got invited to a Polish Christmass dinner at the church on Sunday.

So I went and it was quite nice to be able to eat some polish food that the people have prepared and to meet and talk to people. There were around 30 people there some in similar situations to myself. Good times!

On Christmas Day, I met up with a friend of mine from Japanese class and we went to enjoy the festive mood of downtown Nagoya and take lots of pictures of the beautiful decorations. It was a bit chilly but we managed to survive. ... upcoming picture spam...

The Central park in Sakae had a great amount of decorations and some kind of festival going on.

At the entrance was this awesome looking light tiger.

A nice Christmas tree with the Nagoya TV tower in the background.

Apart from the small lights, there were lamps all around the pathways, some decorated with writing and pictures.

People were able to walk around and look at them all.

アカリナイト (akarinaito) - light/lamp night? map - central park is quite large, many city blocks in length.

The TV tower illuminated by lights.

View of the Oasis21 building

One of the famous Japanese department stores.

Side view of the Sunshine Sakae ferris wheel.

A fountain.

Phoenix?

There were lots of little huts where you could buy food.

Dragon!

Boat. On this picture you see a laser beam from the TV tower in the background to basically on the other side of the street from where I took this picture (which is about 6 city blocks distance). In front is the boat statue.

There was definitely many lights on trees in Sakae!

Whole streets full of!

To those complaining that there are no people in my pictures - see... people.. lots of people.. and cars... and lights...

Sunshine Sakae bears at night. It's funny, the next day, they were all covered with some warm stuff to prevent them from freezing I think?

Cute bear:

From Sakae, we walked to Nagoya train station (around 3km walk) and took some pictures along the way.

The tallest building in Nagoya had a tree design made from lights! You can see the observation deck where the blue is at the top.

Some very fancy looking restaurant.

Even the canals had lights!

Finally made it to the train station - it was also quite decorated.

The Pass'e department store looked nice in the dark. This store has loads of women only clothes and from the looks of it, for younger women. I go there often to buy women's clothes... no..hehe.. but I do go there to visit the Tower Records store at the 7th floor (I think 7th...). Whenever I went there, I saw some girl dressed up in lolita fashion which was quite interesting!

The grand train station buildings at night.

Some lights show just outside of the buildings.

I don't know why but the theme was hedgehogs... so pretty much every animal there was a hedgehog.

So after we sufficiently got cold and hungry walking around taking pictures... we went to this really nice Chinese restaurant near campus. The food was delicious!!! I missed the spiciness/kick of Chinese food.