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Today I hopped on the Nozomi Shinkansen, affectionately called a “bullet train,” and headed to Kyoto. Traveling by train beats the heck out of flying, especially with lots of leg-room, no body-cavity searches at the airport, and really smooth welded rail. It does make me a bit nostalgic for the old days—the clickety clack of the rails, NOT the security check-points. I have not seen a lot of young children in Japan. When I have, they’ve always been with their mothers. This little guy was adorable.

In Kyoto Station I found there’s a great tourist information office. Actually there are a few. The one for foreigners is handily inside a department store on the ninth floor. It took me a while to find it, bt once I did they were great. They were able to find me a room in a Ryokan, which is a “Japanese-style inn.” It was a relief to have a place to stay. I had called three places this morning from Tokyo, and all were full. I ran out of time, and had to catch the train, so I wasn’t sure where I would be sleeping. The hotel that I was originally planning to stay at is booked-up on many days for months in advance.

Upon leaving the airport, I immediately headed south instead of north, and walked for quite a while without recognizing any street names; most are not in romanji. I have a small key-chain compass with me, which is great for self-orientation upon walking out of subway or train stations, but I didn’t check it. I guess I should have. Is it too late to blame this sort of thing on jet-lag? I’m still waking up at five. If I really needed an excuse, I’d blame it on the fact that maps in Japan do not always have north pointing up. North can be anywhere. One perk is that I got a couple of photos of a building under construction. It’s very precise mill-work with great joinery.

I got to Kyoto yesterday. I’ll write more tomorrow. It’s been tough to find Internet access. I had a good day walking the Philosopher’s walk, but I’m totally beat. I’ve uploaded some photos, I’ll link to them tomorrow.

I spent today with another Australian, Naomi. She just finished Uni, studying GIS, and she’s spending five weeks in Japan and then going to Europe for two months. She’s been studying Japanese on and off since Grade 7, which made today easy. We went to Akihabara, which the tech-gadget capital of Tokyo, and maybe the world.

Interestingly, in the US there is a radio company called Yaesu (Japanese name, must be good) which produced the VX-7R, the best radio ever. In Japan the company is called Standard (English name, must be good). Here it’s the VX-7. In addition to high-tech gadget stores, Akihabara has it’s share of the just plain weird.

Later in the day, we walked down through the Ginza business district and over to the Emperial Palace, which we could only see from the outside. Here’s part of the wall. There are more famous views online.

The vending machines here are great. They have hot drinks as well as cold. Bottles of hot tea are 130 yen (118 yen per USD). The machines are everywhere, but nobody seems to drink anything on the street. I saw one young punk drinking tea on the subway. He must have been some kind of radical. I also saw one Japanese girl eating ice cream while walking down the sidewalk.

I have not figured out what side of the sidewalk to walk on. It’s either chaos or beyond my understanding. There’s less order than I expected. There’s also a lot more English than I expected on signs. There is no garbage anywhere, even between the tracks on the subway. This is the only major city that I’ve ever been in that doesn’t smell like garbage.

There are at least three subway and train companies in Tokyo. Not all of them go everywhere. It’s been a little tough when the station names are only in kanji (Chinese characters), and not in romanji (our Roman characters). One person told me that the Japanese think of romanji as English characters. Young Japanese people have been very helpful in pointing me in the right direction and figuring out my fare. One trick is to buy the cheapest ticket and pay the difference upon exiting.

Pocari Sweat is a good-tasting Gatorade-type of drink. It’s not as sweet as it would be in the states. I got it at the 7/11. Japan seems to do fast food better than we do. 7/11 and “am pm” both have these great rice balls, sushi rice with various flavors, like “pinkish,” “purplish,” and “white with green stringy stuff on top.” Nothing too bad so far.

Today I went to the National Museum, which is closed on Mondays, along with everything else. This is the same reason that I have almost no photos of the inside of anything in Hanoi. I met a couple of Australians, Brian and Prue, who also failed to read their guidebook carefully. We ended up spending most of the day bumming around Tokyo together. They’ve lived in Scotland for five years and are taking the long way home over a few months. More than half the tourists I’ve met have been Australians. I’ve not met any Americans. Prue was looking for gifts for Brian’s nieces, but Brian had other ideas.

We walked around the Senso-ji Shrine which had some traditional and more modern statues.

A Dutch woman, Marrigje, is traveling around the world taking pictures of the interiors of people’s houses. It’s really tough in Japan because people are often uncertain of how to act around foreigners. She wanders around with a medium format camera, a huge tripod and a letter in Japanese introducing her and what she’s trying to do. She speaks no Japanese, and only two or three people each day let her in to their homes. She showed us some scanned images of her photos my first night here. It was very interesting to see the struggle [her word] between traditional furnishings (low tables and mats on the floor) and western style furniture. The rooms are quite small, and seem even smaller when you stick a couch, table, and an entertainment center in them. They also seem to split the difference a bit, for example chairs with backs but no legs, or desks that are six inches shorter than western ones so it seems there would be no comfortable way to sit at them, with or without a chair.

It’s been very overcast and rainy so far, so I haven’t gotten much for photos. Everything has a flat gray background. My friend Luke was here during a typhoon which helped blow away the clouds. I don’t think I’ll have that kind of luck. I’m headed to Kyoto. Today I need to find a train ticket and a place to stay in Kyoto. I’ll also be headed back to the National Museum, and out to the Meiji Shrine.

I just wanted to drop a quick note that I made it safely. The flight wasn’t as bad as I expected. The 747-400 that I was on had trouble with its Betamax player at first, but we eventually watched some movies. They apparently still make Beta tapes just for the airlines.

We flew over northern Canada and Alaska overnight, but we followed the sun so it was light out all the way to Japan. Can someone tell me if that was the Yukon River that I saw out of the starboard window soon after we crossed the Alaska/Canada border, or if it was Fairbanks that we saw out the port on UA 881 on 11/25?