Nagoya Castle

Despite the clouds and slight rain, our trip to Nagoya Castle was wonderful! Several volunteer students from NUFS organized the trip and showed us around. The castle was built nearly 400 years ago!! However, it burned down during the war and then was rebuilt on the remaining stone foundation in 1959. This year they have begun the re-construction of the lower castle buildings, expected to take about 15 years (in time for the 400th anniversary in 2025). The castle gardens are quite beautiful especially since the cherry blossoms have just started to come out. The castle itself is quite tall, about 7 stories (nearly the same height as the statue of liberty apparently). Inside is a museum and top-floor observatory. Back at the bottom we bought green tea and cherry-blossom flovoured ice cream and waffle-like things with red bean paste in the middle... very interesting! On the way home we stopped at an electronics store and I was able to buy a used 2008 electronic dictionary for about $250 with English, Japanese and Spanish already in it. It costs about $100 per language to add other ones to it.