Hanging out with the father-in-law

This actually happened on the 15th, just haven’t gotten around to downloading the pictures.  My father-in-law (Otousan is Japanese for dad) wanted to spend the day with me.  Of course he spoke very little English (and with a heavy accent) while I spoke very little Japanese, but we managed to get by (it was just the two of us).  Airi’s mom (Okaasan is Japanese for mom) dropped us off at the train station.  From there we went to downtown Nagoya and took a subway.  Here’s a pic of an underground mall area that connects the train station to the subway station.  Otousan is on the left.

 

After the subway, we walked around for a bit.  Otousan wanted to take me to this temple.  We walked through some old parts of downtown and in the middle of tall skyscrapers somewhat hidden from view was this shrine.  You see lots of mixing of new and old (especially architecture style from feudal Japan).

We had some ramen for lunch and on the way back home to the train station, I saw a Nissan gallery in the underground area and they had the new GT-R SpecV on display.  This is a limited edition version of the regular GT-R (~$70k) that has higher end suspension, higher end brakes, and tons more carbon fiber to lower the weight.  It’s mainly aimed at racing enthusiasts and costs ~$170k.  I don’t think the SpecV will be available in the US and the differences between the SpecV and the regular GT-R don’t seem to justify the price.

 

More to come later.  I’m using the new Windows Live Writer software from Microsoft to write this blog entry, so it’s actually much easier (especially for inserting pictures), so this may prompt me to make more frequent updates.