Free trip to Nagoya

At the beginning of the summer, Ayako entered a radio show contest by writing about what kind of trip she would do with some prize money if she won. Her essay was one of the six chosen, so she won a ¥10,000 ($120 CAD) gift certificate from a travel agency. With the money, we got a free hotel room in the centre of Nagoya for a night.

During the 2 days in Nagoya, we looked around at some areas we thought we might like to move to next year. In the evening, we could do a bit of shopping and also got to enjoy a Nagoya special dish of pork cutlet with miso sauce on top:

Since we were staying overnight on a weekday, the hotel (Princess Garden Hotel) bumped us up to a fancier room. The hotel was very nice, especially since the usual cost of staying there is not so high and it's in the centre of the shopping district of Nagoya (Sakae). We definitely recommend staying there if you visit Nagoya.

Unagi Pie Factory Tour

Yesterday was one of the 'hot' Midsummer Days in Japan according to the Chinese Zodiac, although it was actually cool and cloudy. Nevertheless, it is customary to eat eel on the 2 Midsummer Days since it helps give you energy to cope with the heat. While I was in Korea, the same days were observed, although it was customary to eat dog there.

Ayako and I enjoyed having eel on rice for lunch at home. Afterwards, we drove down to the factory where a local snack is made from eel, 'Unagi Pie' (unagi means eel in Japanese). Some of you reading this may have tried this since this is the local snack that I have brought back to Canada. The snack is made of thin pastry with powder made from eel and is baked into a thin, sweet biscuit covered in butter and sugar:

When we got to the factory, the parking lot was full with so many people wanting to take the tour. On the tour, we got to find out how the idea of Unagi Pie came about and how they are made. We could also look down into the factory and see the different steps of Unagi Pie being made. At the end of the tour, we had our photo take with human-sized versions of the snack. The original version is in the middle, and with nuts on the left and with brandy on the right:
On the tour, we were given some sample-sized Unagi Pie, but we also bought some in the gift shop at the end of the tour. We bought the 'family pack', which was specially priced since it contained the Unagi Pie that wasn't worthy of selling in stores.

It was nice that we could fully enjoy having eel for both lunch and as a snack on this Midsummer Day. It's definitely one of my favourite foods in Japan.