Japan Spring 2024 - Part 7 Nagoya

 

From Kobe after lunch, we took the Hikari Shinkansen to Nagoya. I booked Via Inn Nagoya for a couple of nights because it’s walking distance from Nagoya Station. We made use of the Ta-Q-Bin services again for our luggages and it did make our life so much easier. 

Train Tickets from Kobe to Nagoya

By the time we checked in and settled, it was already getting dark. I remembered though, that there’s a Creperie near the hotel that I wanted to visit. It was called Crepes de Anne and I particularly wanted to get their cute crepe. They had three options and Miss Kiki opted for a little brown hedgehog with mini dango. She had been wanting to try dango after all. Just look at this too-cute-to-eat crepe!

We only bought one crepe to share because it was close to dinner time and it was a good thing we did. The crepe was stuffed with mostly whipped cream and a few strawberry slices. We would not have been able to eat one on our own! We were enjoying our Dango outside, and while I was holding the crepe I actually dropped the mini dango… right to the ground. The shop was already closed so we could not get another one. I think I almost made Miss Kiki cry because of that. We looked at the 🍡, we laughed, and laughed until we cried. We ended up picking it up and washing the dango before eating it 😂. Whoops!

The next destination was the Oasis 21 which is a shopping mall with a rooftop platform where you can go up and get a good view of the Nagoya TV Tower. At the corner of the mall, you can find the At Nagoya sign. 

At Nagoya Sign

Rooftop

Rooftop

Now when anyone talks about Nagoya, they always talk about their food culture. How the Nagoya people is big on food, and they have several dishes that they take pride in. One of their specialty is the red miso paste, and the most common dish to have it with is the tonkatsu. Thus, for dinner we went to one of the famous tonkatsu location and had red miso katsu. It turns out that we all like the normal tonkatsu sauce better Lol. 

Katsu Dinner

On the following day, our plans got messed up because Nagoya gifted us with a whole day of rain and clouds. In the end, we did what most Jakartans like to do… go to the mall. :D We walked in the light rain to AEON Mall, had delicious pork dish there, and spent the whole day browsing the mall. This Aeon mall has the largest Seria shop we’ve seen during our trip with a good selection of items. In case you are not familiar with Seria, it is a store similar to Daiso where most of the items are priced at 100yen. At this AEON you can also find the Instagrammable Tsutaya bookstore.

Walking in the rain

Pork lunch

Tsutaya Bookstore

At the AEON supermarket, they had a variety of strawberries for sale. Some of them were cheap and some were quite expensive. They were all local strawberries, and I had never known that Japan has so many strawberry varieties! I ended up buying 6 types of strawberries that came in 5 packages. They were all amazingly tasty! I reviewed them each on my Instastory highlight, so if you have access to it you can head over there and take a look. :)

White strawberry-sweet and tasty!

Strawberry tasting

Strawberry Chart

Nagoya has a cute mascot called Piyorin, a little yellow chick. Piyorin has a bakery that sells cake and other goodies. The cake itself is limited and like a lot of other things in Japan, you have to come at the right time and line up for it. Aside from the chick-shaped cream cake, they have cookies, baumkuchen, bento, and other merch in Piyorin shape, and these are available in souvenir stores in Nagoya. What do you think, isn’t it adorable? :)

Piyorin Baumkuchen