Japan – Upon Arrival

Well, let me try this again. It would appear that Blogger is being stupid today, so you just might be getting a whole lot of entries, 4 pictures at a time. Sorry about that. Now where was I? Oh, right. Well, Carly and I are back in Singapore, and now we must carry on with our duty of blogging our adventures to the masses. Or at least to the three people who read this rubbish

We had quite the whirlwind tour of Japan, hitting up a ton of places in the 15 days we were there. We’ll post the entries in the order that we traveled, and try to remember any neat stories.

To start, we arrived in Tokyo in the late afternoon, got our bags together, picked up our Japan Rail Passes, and grabbed a train into the city. We were spending one night in Tokyo before jumping on the Shinkansen (translated as “New Trunk Line” – the bullet trains) to head all the way south to Nagasaki.
Finding our hostel in Tokyo proved to be a heckuva challenge, as addresses in Japan are not sequential, but based on construction dates or some such nonsense. After about 45 minutes, and asking about 12 people for assistance, we happened to ask a young couple and an old guy on a bike, and they took a detour from their walk, taking us directly to the front door of our accommodation. We found the Japanese to be very polite and hospitable, and thoroughly enjoyed the cultural part of the trip to Japan.

Accommodation was great (in my opinion), we were in a 4 bed room, and listened to some very amusing conversation outside our door that a couple Aussies were having with a really dumb American guy. It provided a couple hours of amusement before we fell asleep.

We went to Denny’s for breakfast that morning, before heading back to Tokyo Station. Unfortunately for me, there was no Lumberjack Breakfast to be found. At least we didn’t have to eat sushi for breakfast. Although, at this point I have no recollection whatsoever of what we did eat for breakfast that morning.

Throughout our entire time in Japan, one of the most amazing things was the trains. Trains everywhere. Every minute. All the time, and all on time. No fanfare, just get on the train, or it will leave without you.

The logistics behind the train systems is something to behold. We arrived at a platform sometimes only 5-6 minutes before our train was supposed to leave, and so we naturally assumed that the train currently in the platform was ours. Quite often we were wrong, ours was the next train, everything down to the minute.