Toyoda and Silk

First, the joke. The busiest store at the Nagoya train station, with a queue that required portable barriers to keep it in line, was the popcorn shop.

The reason for coming down to Nagoya again was to visit the Toyota technology museum, and boy, we had no idea what was in store for us. We thought we were going to simply cruise through the silk section and move to the automotive section. Until one of the staff got us and started demonstrating the varies pieces of machinery they had.

I'm rather used to museums where they show old pieces of technology, usually with a thick layer of paint to combat the rust buildup and three quarters of the screws missing. But what they had, including machines from around 1940, was all actually operational, working, and indeed being demonstrated. On top of that, they have enough staff that they were giving us personal demonstrations and always carefully handing is over to the next person to show the next machine in the correct order.

If you were ever faintly curious about how various silk machines work, or curious about how to run an informative museum properly, this is one museum I can't recommend highly enough. How the automotive part of the museum went, I leave to your imaginations.

We hope that today was the end of the rain. My shoes are still wet from yesterday, and cold in general still doesn't agree with me. I haven't even been daring to look at the weather forecasts back home anymore. That's a problem for future me.