What to do when the weather is crap and you already visited the best coffee place (maybe all over Japan)? BTW it’s Blanket cafe and they serve a fantastic selection of coffee with the style of your choice (filter, french-press…) and serve fresh Italian Biscoti.
Blanket Cafe
Having a Japan RailPass which allows me to travel the Shinkansen bullet trains freely and a new Shinkansen line starting from Kanazawa which premiered just a year ago I decided to choose a city within reach with better weather. Yes, Nagano is more than 200km away and I made the choice to go somewhere else just after lunch, the train only took approximately an hour. I just love this train network. To be honest I did not know more than there was once a Winter Olympics about Nagano.
Train record to Nagano
Winter Olympics 1998
As it turned out it is a really cute pilgrim city with a really beautifully arranged pedestrian area surrounded by temples and shrines.
Of course I also tried the typical local speciality. In the case of Nagano are Oyaki. Oyaki is a vegetable stuffed bun. The place to buy them is Irohado which also has a store directly located in the mall close to the central station. The flavours I tried where radish, thistle and nozawana (a traditional Japanese vegetable).
Oyaki
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