I woke up to a beautiful morning, already 20 degrees. The hotel had yoghurt and musli, so given the chance, I passed on Japanese breakfast.
My plan today was to visit the Modern Art Gallery and the Prefectural Museum. I took the bus to the castle and walked through the castle grounds to the museum. There were lots of small kids visiting the castle and lots of ninja’s to great them.
It is exactly a year ago that I last visited the museum of modern art and was impressed, with many European artists as well as Japanese being exhibited. The downstairs exhibition was unchanged from last year with Japanese contemporary art, plus the odd non Japanese artist, e.g. Miro. The pictures above are from downstairs. Upstairs it was a new exhibition, loving (your) life. It didn’t do very much for me and I was disappointed.
The prefectural museum told the story how Wakayama prefecture had developed through time, with a big focus on Kumano Kodo. But there wasn’t much, and as they concluded, this gives a small idea, you can only really experience it if you do it. That I agree.
I walked across town and found out that Wakayama also has a covered walking street, and on it was a used CD shop, that had one CD that I was looking for. I walked slowly into town and found a place to eat, sashimi.
I picked up my bag and took the train towards the airport. There is a big outlet close to the airport and I spent the afternoon there with lots of Chinese, and bought a couple of things for Lene and myself.
I saw the following at a bus stop – whipped cream shampoo!
The outlet closed at 20.00 so I still had 5,5 hours to kill. I ate sushi for the last time, at least this time, at the airport and checked in. Online checkin evidently isn’t in here – I was pretty much the only one in the baggage drop queue. As I write this I still have two hours to wait. (Below, the towards the airport, including the bridge that was damaged in last years storm.)
It is estimated that 300 flavours of kit-kat have been nade in Japan since 2000. The Japanese love kit kat as it sounds, when they say it like good luck. I saw 10 pr so flavours at the airport, including, sake, apple, strawberry, peach, cheesecake and various tea flavours. And of course banana.
l’ll write up some final thoughts and conclusions in a separate post once back home.
