so what about japan?

Aah, Japan. It all seems so distant now, the month of January taking forever to finish, but so much happening that it all seems so long ago now…

It all began with an offer in the Evening Standard for cheap airfares, and £200 to Tokyo seemed too good to pass up. After persuading George that I wanted her to come too, we had tickets booked for a week in Japan.

When Stewart visited for New Years Eve we started to provisionally plan for the week – the first bombshell being how much time and money it would take to get to Fukuoka, where he is based for his teaching job. We lumped for the train (a weekly pass would cover most of our travel in the country), which gave us the chance to be flexible – and gave me the chance to experience the famous Bullet Train. The only downside being that we would have much less time than I originally thought, and much more time would be spent travelling. It would at least give me the chance to read some of those books I got for christmas, I guess.

The flight was fairly uneventful – a friend of George’s, an air steward for BA, had flagged up our names for upgrades, which unfortunately didn’t happen – with lots of Alan Partridge to keep George occupied! We had the ‘to sleep or not to sleep’ dilemma to deal with, but trying to work out what was the best course of action sent me to sleep anyway. Arriving at Tokyo airport was the first time that I felt ‘unprepared’ – it was fairly easy to blag your way around reading the english signs, but there is something disconcerting not being able to read, or even translate, things that you see. We managed to make our way to the train, exchanged our vouchers for passes and got booked on trains all the way to Hakata, where Stewart would be meeting us seven hours later…

Tokyo station was incredible – full of people, and once again completely overwhelming. We managed to find the platform for our next train (to Osaka) and then hit upon the ‘eating’ problem, there was lots of food, but we weren’t sure what to do with it – how to buy it, what to buy, how to eat it, how much to get. It was all very confusing. And there were no forks!

A mention must be made of the trains – I had high expectations, and they were all met, clean, punctual and leg room to die for (especially after eleven hours on a plane). The punctuality aspect was reinforced when we were given a ticket for a train that left osaka two minutes after we arrived. And we made it too!