Last weekend was the Tall Ships Festival in Nagasaki. It was fun going down to the harbor and looking at the boats, people, music, and the food. Yukiko and I spend the better part of half a day wondering around near the harbor until it came time for the fireworks, which were pretty but over too quickly.

Tall Ships Festival

Matt, Sean and I went to the Tall Ships Festival 3 years ago during our semester stay in Nagasaki. This year seemed very similar to 3 years ago. However, there is a new park on Nagasaki Harbor that opened about 1 month ago. The new park really adds to the harbor and makes the Tall Ships Festival feel larger and more legitement. The festival felt kind of small and cramped for space 3 years ago.

Two weeks ago I came down with a cold. I wasn`t happy getting the cold, but I did`t have much choice. The cold would only last about a week, so I thought, so I started to get concerned when it didn`t seem to go away completely. The body fatigue and headache gradually went away, but my nose got worse. Today I went into a nose doctor and found my suspicion of a sinus infection to be correct. On the plus side, I now have some medication that should clear up my nose within a week.

The last two weeks haven`t been to enjoyable because of the cold and now the sinus infection. Still, I suppose it could be worse, I could have gotten an ear infection or come down with bronchitis.

The doctors office was a little strange. First the doctor had me sit in the inspection chair next to his desk where he looked into my nose. Then I had a quick x-ray taken. Not so strange. After the x-ray, a nurse led me over to a wash basin that held a small bowl of warm water and short extent of orange hose with rubberball hand pump. I was instructed to place one end of the hose into my nose and then pump warm the warm water into and through my sinuses. It was an extremely odd sensation, and not too pleasant, as the water flowed through my nasal cavity to the back of my mouth and then out of my mouth into the sink. When I was told to switch nostrils, I discovered that the water was supposed to travel into my sinuses and then out the opposite nostril. The water did a good job of cleaning everything out of my sinuses, and I actually felt quite a bit better afterward, disgusting as it was. I noted that the nurse had turned away from me while I performed the cleansing procedure, couldn`t say that I blamed her.

One of the things that I always find disturbing about the first tier of health care in Japan is how unsanitary and old everything seems to be. The nose doctor`s office was poorly lit and the room contained well used medical devices that seemed several decades old. The American feel of a doctors visit was completely lacking. Not that it wasn`t adequate, far from it, it just didn`t feel like what I have come to expect from doctor visits in the States. I doubt I`ll ever get used to it.