Japan - Day 11 - Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...and let's ride the bullet train!

30th December, 2007

Today is travel day.  We needed to get from Hakuba to Kyoto.  And since I went skiing yesterday, today brought fresh snow.  Lots of it.  By the time we left at 10 AM, there was probably six inches of new snow on the ground at the base of the ski areas.  As I write this on 1st January, 2008, a friend I met that stayed behind to ski said there was TONS of new snow.  Great.  It all shows up after I leave.  Oh well, I had a fun day of skiing yesterday.

We left Hakuba around 10:00 AM to find our way to Kyoto.  We took a local train to Matsumoto, then had about an hour layover.  Long enough to get lunch, but not long enough to see the castle that's only a 15 minute walk from the train station.  I guess we'll just have to come back to Japan.  We hopped on another train for a two-hour ride to Nagoya for a short layover before boarding the Shinkansen.  (For us foreigners, it's the BULLET TRAIN!)  We traveled 150 km in only 36 minutes.  For you metric-system-challenged folks out there, I did some math for you.  Our average speed for the trip was 153 miles per hour.  And this isn't even the fastest train in Japan.  The fastest trains here go 180+ mph, with a new experimental train approaching 300+ mph.  Wow.

Needless to say, the bullet train was fun to ride, even if the trip was a bit short.

We arrived in Kyoto and took a short subway ride to our stop.  After we got settled at our place, our host took us to the grocery store and a local Japanese restaurant.  The food was fantastic!  We sampled a number of different traditional dishes:  tonkatsu, curry, and Okonomi-yaki pancakes.  The Okonomi-yaki pancakes were the coolest part of the night.  It's a cabbage/egg/meat-based pancake that we cooked at our table.  Since we're not big "food" travelers (Translation:  Since Lowell and David are picky eaters...), this was our first really traditional Japanese dinner, so it was great to have something so unique.  I forgot my camera for dinner, so I don't have pictures to show you.  I'm bummed, because it was very cool!

Otherwise, this was a pretty uneventful day.

The line-up of shoes at the front door of the hostel...quite a site.	David the "rock star" with his cool new magnetix hand-crafted necklace.	The snow falling at the train station in Hakuba.	The engineer on the first train from Hakuba to Matsumoto.
Devin and David thumb-wrestling while riding the train.	A view of the fields in the Hakuba valley.	The shinkansen, aka bullet train.	A stone monument in Kyoto on our way to our place.