The Oak Hotel in Tokyo
A monk outside Ueno Station
Drink Georgia brand canned coffee and you will be very cool!
Echigo-Yuzawa
The Hakutaka Limited Express from Echigo-Yuzawa to Kanazawa
Riding the Shinkansen
The most fascinating things we saw today. The mountain valley town of Echigo-Yuzawa, where we changed trains. Fashionable young men with big hair in black suits and elf shoes patrolling the main intersection of Katamachi-tori in Kanazawa. A small canal tiled roof houses and picturesque little bridges criss-crossing it.
Shinkansen. Today we traveled from Tokyo to Kanazawa on the Shinkansen, or bullet train. It doesn't really get up to speed until outside of the cities, and then you don't have buildings whipping by right next to you, so you don't really get a sense of high speed. As we were going from the east coast to the west coast across the spine of Japan (mountains in the middle, yeah it's a basically a big pacific island, you get the picture), I expected lots of spectacular mountain scenery. Nope, lots of tunnels. Thinking it through, of course my expectation was out of line. We're riding a fast train, right? When do trains go fast? When they're on straight tracks, or twisty, mountain tracks?
Our first fall colors. Echigo-Yuzawa, where we changed trains, is a mountain town in a narrow valley (kind of like Nelson, B.C., but with a longer valley and longer town - and no lake). The air was noticeably cooler and crisper than Tokyo, and the mountain sides were covered with trees showing their fall colors. We ate in the train station, having onigiri for the first time. One of our big failings in Japanese is that we don't know the names for any foods (like asparagus, carrots, etc.). Our waitress chewed the end of her pen as she tried to recall the English words for some of the dishes available. As one of our Japanese friends predicted, many people in Japan have taken English in school, but maybe have not really spoken or practiced it since then - but can still understand and remember a few things.
Really lost for the first time. Possessing a small gif map from the internet, we tried to walk from the Kanazawa train station to our hotel, which we thought to be about a 20 or maybe 30 minute walk (with all our luggage). One hour later, we were hopelessly lost. Early in our journey, we stopped and asked directions from two women working in a small office. They did not speak English, but kindly copied two map pages out of a kind of Thomas guide map for Kanazawa for us, and sent us to follow a narrow canal - a short cut compared to the main streets we had planned to follow. We asked directions two other times, showing our newly acquired Japanese maps to people, who looked at them, scratched their heads, and then gave us their best guess of which way to go. All this matches the chaotic description of Japanese addresses that I had read about. Many streets are unnamed, and the numbers in an address refer to a ward, a block within a ward, and the building number. And these numbers aren't necessarily in any sequence. For instance, buildings might be given a number according to when they were built, not their order on the block. When I asked our friends Yuko and Azusa how the find a place they've never been too before, their reply was "I ask someone who knows where it is." Unfortunately, no one knew where our hotel was. We finally hailed a cab, and the driver knew our hotel (after a moment's reflection).
Elbow room. Our hotel room here at the Hotel Econo Asper is about twice the size of the one in Tokyo. I had read that many hotel rooms in Japan are smaller than we're used to in North America. In the room in the Oak Hotel in Tokyo, whenever we moved around we had to do a kind of "sliding tile puzzle" routine to get around one another. Don't get the idea that we didn't like the hotel, though. The staff were very friendly and helpful, the location was great, and the price very reasonable. We'll be staying there again when we return to Tokyo.
What did we learn today? I'm continually reminded of our insular and isolated our North Amerian culture is from the rest of the world. It's kind of embarrassing, really. So many people here know at least a little English. We were adventurous again for dinner, eating in a small restaurant where you cook your own food and a small brazier in the middle of the table. The staff spoke no English (except for remembering the English words for some food, like mushrooms, corn, etc.). "How . . . food . . . to do?", I asked, pointing at the brazier. Awkward, but understandable as I got a very nice demonstration on how to cook.