I got up early to pack and get ready and arrived only about five minutes late at the office, just in time for the final “gambarimasho!” of the weekly meeting.  Miss Shimizu and I soon left to catch our train to Gifu.  This involved my first experience of people squeezing their way into an already full train.  At the next station, half of them spilled out.  Two stations later, the car was almost empty. 

The sun had come out and shone on the countryside we zipped through with the shinkansen.  First, a sea of buildings, then a series of tunnels punctuated by flashes of buildings, then the Shizuoka tea plantations and for a brief moment the top of Mt. Fuji to the right.  Then, the chemical companies (such as the Pocari Sweat works), the plains, and again a sea of buildings as Nagoya approached. 

It’s nice having a Japanese accompany me on travels because I continually learn what I still do wrong.  Miss Shimizu told me off for whistling the shinkansen jingle inside the train – it’s impolite to make any noise in a closed but public room.  Then, I chucked my pet bottle with a little too much gusto and attracted the attention of a middle-aged lady in a pink one-piece who kept checking me out after that.  But having a Japanese like Miss Shimizu with me is particularly good for my language skills, because every time I make a mistake, she laughs and then corrects me.  Hers is a laugh of genuine amusement and not of mockery – it’s the way I feel like laughing when a friend makes a funny mistake in German. 

We dropped our bags at the Gifu Castle Inn and took a taxi to the Nagase Integrex factory.  Of the three of us – Miss Shimizu, the taxi driver, and I – I was the only one to ever have been there, which meant that I’d be called upon to confirm the taxi driver’s turns.  Again, describing the upcoming scenery I made Miss Shimizu laugh, for example when I tried to say that grave markers were coming up on the right, it came out sounding like “The grave markers are coming!!!”  She thought it sounded a bit scary, not at all in tune with the pastoral setting by the river that she kept exclaiming about. 

We set up our booth in good time.  I’m looking forward to some of the other exhibitors – some big names.  Although I hope for commercial success, whatever happens it won’t be a boring fair.  The fair is inside the manufacturing hall and every time I visit the smells of paint and machine oil remind me of accompanying Dad through his company as a kid and seeing the expansion tanks spray-painted or deep-drawn or the rubber sheaths vulcanized together.  If I chose my job based on nostalgia, I’d become a factory supervisor. 

We headed back to Gifu and dined at the Tonpu teppanyaki restaurant Mr. Nagao had recommended.  It was tasty, and because we didn’t order that much I for once didn’t leave a restaurant all stuffed.  One of the dishes was “nankotsu,” batter-fried chicken cartilage, which tasted much better than what you’d expect.  Of course, they had a bit of a crunchy texture.  On our stroll back to the hotel I finally managed to adjust my walking speed to the height differential between the two of us.  I have such a tendency to walk quickly that I almost lost Miss Shimizu a few times on the way here. 

If you see this, the internet is working again.  Wahoo!