Nagoya/Expo/Sumo

I'm back in the office after another non-stop weekend. Saturday morning I woke up around 5:30 so that I could catch the train bound for Tokyo station. The plan was to meet Dan, Nam, and Aditi in the station and take the Shinkansen (新幹線, bullet train) out to Nagoya (名古屋). I arrived about 30 minutes early, and managed to find Nam and Aditi after a few phone calls. Dan was running late, even though he was the one who had our $800 in combined tickets on his credit card; fortunately he showed up about 5 minutes before the train took off and we found our seats. The Shinkansen goes some incredible speed around 300 km/h, so we arrived in Nagoya exactly two hours after we left Tokyo. Once there, we met up with 5 other NSF/EAPSI fellows who had arranged different transportation and proceeded to the World Expo. There were two transportation choices— we could either take a shuttle bus or a train followed by Japan's first mag-lev train. Of course we chose the mag-lev train, which turned out to be a mistake. It was totally packed, and the experience was not substantially different from riding a more conventional train. It also took about 30 minutes longer in total than the bus would have. Once at the Expo grounds we stood in line to get in, at which point we had the choice of several lines to get some food. There are basically two types of attractions at the expo; countrypavilionss and corporatepavilionss. In the countrypavilionss you learn about what life is like in that country, while in the corporatepavilionss you learn about the cool new technologies that will change our lives in the future. We found food in the Sri Lankanpavilionn. I'd never eaten Sri Lankan food before, but I don't think it's substantially different from South Indian food. The corporatepavilionss have insane lines, around 3-4 hours, because about 120,000 people attend the expo each day. Fortunately for the 4 of ustravelingg from Tokyo, our travel agent included a reservation to the JapanRailpavilionn, so we were able to get in at a certain time without waiting. I was pretty excited about thepavilionn since I'm interested in mass transit technology, but the display wasdisappointingg. Instead of really describing the engineering behind mag-lev, they just showed a 20-minute video with trains rushing by to a soundtrack of classical music. It was in 3-D though :-) So the Expo was crowded and rainy, and I didn't see anything that really blew my mind, but I'm still glad I went. We pretty much got the ticket for free by using the travel agency instead of booking the train ticket directly, so my expectations weren't too high, and it was exciting to be a part of such a big event. I get the feeling that the expositions were a bigger deal during the early 1900s when it was more difficult to disseminate information about new technological advances. Sunday morning I woke up in my hotel in Gifu, which is about 30 minutes from Nagoya. Instead of heading directly to Nagoya we first went to Inuyama (犬山) which is famous for having a monkey park and a castle. We finally made it to our seats at Sumo around 3:00. The Sumo tournament ran from 10:00 to 6:00, but the quality of the wrestlers increases as the day goes on so there was still plenty of good Sumo to watch. I think that the thing that surprised me most was how strong the wrestlers were. Even though they all weigh 300-400 pounds, you can still see muscle in their thighs when they squat. They're also quick and explosively powerful. It's true that if you removed all the ceremony the matches would only last about 10 seconds each, but they are a very exciting 10 seconds. Oftentimes the audience would start cheering for reasons that were completely unclear to me, but I just joined in and cheered with them. By the end of the day, we had learned quite a bit about how the sport worked just from observations, and were starting to really understand what was going on. I think that I expected to find it boring, but something that I should do while in Japan; instead, I found it to be a genuinely exciting sport. I may go back, but I think that if I see two spectator sports here the other one should be baseball. I'll post some pictures soon. They're not on my computer right now, and my camera is at home.