Mammoth Flea Market

This past Saturday Paul had to work and so I went alone (with the children) to the largest flea market in Japan. I wish I had taken more pictures, but no one else was taking them, so I figured that it was not allowed.

So I got the children ready and left the apartment. Our first stop was the Family Mart on the corner on our way to the train. I wanted to get somethings to drink for our trip. After we left the Family Mart we headed down the road toward the Nagoya train station, only to discover that I had left the directions at home. We turned around and walked the short bit back to the apartment and retrieved the directions. Then we hit the road again.


At the train station I was relieved that I had written the name of the train line in English and Japanese, because the English name Google Maps gave me was wrong and I was able to find the right train by examining the Kana. Good rule of thumb if you can't speak the language, be sure to write where your going in both your language and the native language.

We got to the platform and waited for the train to arrive. Great thing about the Aonami Line (あおなみ線) we were traveling on was that it starts at Nagoya Station (名古屋) and ends at Kinjo-futo Station (金城ふ頭駅), which is where we were going. That way we didn't need to do any transfers. It took about 30 minutes to get there. It is a nicer ride on the train than on the subway. There is nothing to look at when your on the subway. We passed some of the port of Nagoya and got a chance to see all the artificially made shores that are optimal for loading and unloading ships. If you look up Nagoya on Google Maps or any other satellite map website, you can see all the straight lines that make up the Nagoya shores.

When we got to the Kinjo-futo station it was about a 10 minute walk to the convention center where the flea market was. Paul had bought my ticket in advance at one of the convenient stores near our apartment, which was great, because it would have costed an extra 400 yen to purchase the ticket at the event.

There were so many people and vendors. They had 3 large halls with 50 or more vendors in each hall. There was lots of things available, clothing(new and used), bags, accessories, hats, handmade items, collectibles, toys, vintage stuff, jewelry, dishes. Some of the weird things that I didn't think I would see: newts and sugar gliders. The sugar gliders were at a pet store vendor who also had bunnies, hamsters, gerbils, snakes, and a chameleon, they also had a petting area where you could pet bunnies for 300 yen a person. The man selling the newts had a bunch of bins filled with water, one had the newts and 3 had toys or various sizes, 2 had fish and one had turtles in it.

Food wise they had 25 vendors, among the non-Japanese food, they had hamburgers, Greek food, and pizza available. We had a box lunch that I had packed at home, but it would have been fun to have tried some. I am sure we will have a chance later.

They had live entertainment from 10am to 2pm, but we didn't end up directly watching any. We heard a band sing and partially watched a pro-wrestling match.

Over all it was a great day. The children did pretty well considering there wasn't much that they wanted to look at. No one wet their pants and we got back home safe and sound and with some pokemon stuffed friends too. I would defiantly go again.