Nagasaki

For Dad's second weekend in Japan, we headed to Nagasaki, which is on the west coast of the island of Kyushu, about 4 hours by bullet train and limited express train from my place.
I had never been there before, and as there was a big festival going on that weekend, I thought it would it would be a neat place to check out.
It was a very nice, small, hilly city. One of the nicest things about it, for me, was there were almost no bicycles. In Japan, bikes go on the sidewalk with the pedestrians, and so everywhere you go, you have bikes weaving in and out passing you, just missing you by centimetres. Half the people on bikes aren't even watching in front of them. They're either busy texting on their cellphones, or riding side-by-side (taking up the whole sidewalk in the process) talking to their friends. It drives me nuts!
Anyways, enough of my rant. Nagasaki, by Japanese standards is very foreign. The Portuguese and Dutch started doing business here a few hundred years ago, and because of its proximity to China, there is also a very strong Chinese influence.
The picture at the top is from Chinatown at night. The second picture was a really cool wall with a dragon at what I think was the Chinese Consulate.
The last picture is an arch in the area known as Glover Gardens, which was the area of the city where the wealthy Western merchants used to live.