Nagoya Port Aquarium

Get ready for lots of pictures!  This Saturday I decided to head over to the Nagoya Aquarium.  The aquarium is situated at the Nagoya Port which is a large area of land that has been filled in over the last decades to enlarge the port.  The aquarium is on one "finger" of the filled in area:

To get to the port, I have to take 2 subway lines - it is around 15km and takes about 40 minutes.  Here is the view of the walk between the Nagoya Port subway station and the Port area:

 Nice palm trees!

 Trees still flowering in October.

 You can recognize a Chinese restaurant easily :)

Another flowering tree:

I was hungry so for lunch I decided to go to this Cats Garden Restaurant.  No, it wasn't a Neko Cafe so there weren't any real cats to eat with you, but there were cat pictures everywhere.

I had some kind of an omelet on rice in some kind of sauce.  It was pretty good but not exceptional.

 It looks like the restaurant specializes in desserts but I haven't had a chance to try them - just take a look at the bucket!

 There was also a Red Lobster there (Global Seafood Restaurant?):

In front of the entrance was some kind of a mechanized clam that was performing using a moving puppet:

The aquarium buildings:

Next to the aquarium is a theme park with a large ferris wheel which I can see from my lab at the university.  At night they light it with different lights and it looks nice from the distance.

The aquarium is pretty nice and quite large.  The price is a bit high at 2000 yen (around $25).  I bought a ticket for the aquarium and 3 other attractions of the part for 2400 yen.
The first few tanks were with dolphins and an orca which wasn't very interested in moving around - it just kept its head out of the water and was like that all the time.  In the dolphin tank, some divers were cleaning the bottom floor and the dolphins were trying to play with them:

Better demonstrated with a video:

Some belugas were playing around circling their tank:

The outside of the tanks were visible from the open 3rd floor of the aquarium buildings.

 The orca:

One of the best attractions of the aquarium was a sardine school that often took the form of a tornado.

 Some of them were staying in these holes in the floor and when they would connect, they would form a tornado:

Best demonstrated by videos!


In the sardine tank was a bizarre looking fish that looked totally fake if it wasn't moving and looking at you with that eye!

Yay, some lungfish!

There was definitely a collection of strange fish!

 This thing was huge!

 Camouflage!

 This fish had legs with which it walked on the sand!

 I'm waiting for something....

And other strange ocean life:

 Some jellyfish I managed to capture on video:

There were also some interesting preserved specimens:

There were some nice tanks with colourful fish and other creatures:

Some of these videos have a lot of kids screaming in Japanese.

There were some interesting eels sitting in rock caves that were being cleaned by shrimp.  The eels seemed to love it and would shake their heads from time to time.

Best demonstrated by a video:

There was also a tank with large turtles:

 This strange turtle had a snout and looked more like a pig!

Lungfish:

There was also a very cool (no pun intended) tank for penguins.  I liked it quite a lot.

That's all for the aquarium.  I also went to see a 40min IMAX movie (for free) about biodiversity.  It was a horrible IMAX movie since it looked like it was just upconverted to fix on a large screen but the movie itself was quite interesting and funny.  The best point was when an extinction event was shown (due to volcanos I think) and the death of the various creatures was shown with them floating towards heaven with halos around their heads.

I'll post the rest of the pictures on the next post to decrease size.

1 month

Well, it's been 1 month.  Time flies fast.  Am I celebrating?  Well... not exactly.  I did, however, go for a beer with one of my lab members to a campus "cafe".  We had Lowenbrau beer from Germany (brewed by Asahi in Japan hehe).

So, what are my thoughts so far after one month of living here?  In general, it really isn't that much different than living in Canada.  Well, of course there are some large differences but overall there are tons of similarities and when it boils down to working and making a living, it isn't all that different.

However, Japan is far from the stereotypical Japan that you hear from and see from some tourists and strange news flashes!  It is actually pretty funny since you kinda see the stereotypical america quite often here on TV and in ads.  Things are different but it definitely isn't another world :P.  Plus, you can find bizarre people and things in any country or region of the globe.  Granted, I might have a skewed view due to only 1 month living here and only seeing one city but I don't think this is far from the truth in general.

Some things I really like so far:
*safety (don't have to worry about going places)
*food (it's definitely not the Japanese food I tried in Canada but there is a large emphasis on health when it comes to most of the dishes I come across plus the portions are just right!)
*friendliness (people do seem quite friendly and are quite helpful;  I haven't felt bad feelings toward me because I am a gaijin - sure some people do look at me when they have the chance but doesn't everybody like to do that in general?  I haven't seen anybody stare at me yet :P)

Some things I am not too fond of:
*communication (can't read anything, can't talk to most people, etc)
*friends (or the lack of... not saying people are not friendly, but making friendships is a long term process and coupled with the communication problem much more difficult here)
*the heat in the summer (although it's gotten much better and is quite nice nowadays but the first few weeks were just crazy!)

So, here's to 1 month gone and hopefully much better days to come!