Categories

A sample text widget

Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.

Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan. Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem, suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.

Japan

As I write this, I am on the Nagoya to Tokyo Shinkansen (bullet train, or more literally, new train). For those who don’t know, the Shinkansen are high speed trains that link most major Japan cities together at 250+kph (155+mph). They are a wonderful alternative to air travel since you can go from one end of the country to the other in about 6 hours and from Osaka to Tokyo in about 4 hours or so and you don’t have to deal with security and all that B.S. like you do at airports. On the inside Shinkansen feel more like aircraft than they do a train since the seats are very plane-like and cabin is very streamlined like a plane’s. I would say that other than sake, Shinkansen are my all time favorite thing about Japan (editor’s note: Ok, on second thought, Akihabara is probably my favorite thing about Japan, so that makes the Shinkansen 2nd and sake 3rd).

If you are ever visiting Japan and planning on doing any extensive traveling, I suggest buying a JR Rail Pass and using the Shinkansen a lot. They are very friendly to English speaking travelers. They have ticker-type signs that write out destination info in both English and Japanese and have audio English announcements as well.

As far as Shinkansen go, they are not all created equal. There are different versions that are faster than other versions, etc. The fastest Shinkansen are allocated to the Nozomi trains which are the express Shinkansen trains. Unfortunately a rail pass doesn’t cover those so I mostly wind up taking Hikari, which are kind of the slowest form of Shinkansen. However, even the Hikari are quite fast and you have to be going quite a distance to really see a big difference in travel times.

I often wish the US had something similar since the TSA has made flying such a PITA (Pain In The Ass). Of course, now that those wacko bastard islamic militants have bombed that Spanish train, the TSA will probably make train travel a PITA too, so it probably wouldn’t help. Still, I can’t help but wish we had a Shinkansen from Phoenix to San Deigo and to Las Vegas. It would turn the 6 hour drive into a 2 hour train ride, which would be faster than a plane considering all the BS waiting you have to do to get on a plane.

Anyway, having been on the other major bullet train (the French TGV) as well, I can definitely say hands down that the Shinkansen is the best.

On to another subject. Right now it is the end of March here in Japan and the cherry blossoms are just about to bloom. All my Japanese suppliers are telling how unfortunate it is that I couldn’t be here NEXT week since they will be in bloom. Apparently the Japanese weather reports are carrying the “cherry blossom” report on the news, indicating through iso lines on the map of Japan when each peak cherry blossom period is, sort of like in the US when they do the “Fall Colors” report on the weather channel. Actually I saw one tree in Kisogawa (outside of Nagoya, ask me about my Kisogawa train story sometime) that was already blooming, and it was beautiful, so I am not crying too much. Besides, we had cherry blossoms on our street in Oregon, so I’ve been there and done that.

Incidentally, I found out why my suppliers love cherry blossoms, and it isn’t because they are so beautiful (at least not solely). Apparently the arrival of the cherry blossoms coincides with the arrival of the new hires just out of college and it is considered a right of passage to send these poor slobs out to try to hold a spot for the company under the cherry blossoms to celebrate a party. The “freshmen” as they are called have to get up at some god-awful hour of the morning and go stake out a space under the cherry blossom trees and fend off other “freshmen” from other companies who need a spot until their company-mates show up around 5pm or so…

That’s probably enough for today. Besides, I have to write Christi since I didn’t get a chance to call her this morning. Tonight I am going to go wandering around Tokyo and tomorrow I will go to Akihabara Electric Town and see if I can find any cool electronics to buy.

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>