Well, it's a squillion degrees outside - I've walked around a lot, but I need a bit of a break. So I'll spend some time today blogging...
I love travelling by train! The rental car let us go to some beautiful places, but you can't beat Japanese trains. I'm getting to be a pro at hauling six months' worth of luggage across crowded platforms. I suppose it helps that I'm a giant.:) We had change trains at Nagoya to go to Kyoto, and they only left us 10 minutes between arrival and departure on the next leg. I'm so used to Sydney time tables that I had reconciled myself to the fact that we'd have to just catch the next train. But we were on time to the minute, and found our connecting train with minutes to spare. Woohoo!
I'm amazed at how orderly and organised everything is here. Not a speck of graffiti, and public facilities are spotlessly maintained. The toilets in the train stations are cleaner than the ones on campus at home (what is it about toilets that turns Australian university students feral??). People seem to take an individual responsibility to keep things clean and to respect public spaces - I could get used to this!
I've also been really impressed by how approachable and helpful people have been. The first time we took a bus in Nagano, we obviously didn't have any idea what we were doing. We only had giant notes, not the small coins we needed to pay the fare, and the people behind us tried to pay our fare for us. The taxi driver who dropped us at our hotel in Kyoto charged us less than the fare on the meter (when has that ever happened??). Mark's iPad got left in the rental car in Nagano, and when we arrived in Kyoto, there was an email waiting for us, asking where they could ship it to. It arrived at our hotel the following morning, for a whopping fee of $8.
Or maybe it takes a whole country working together to keep Mark and I travelling!!
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