Shinkansen

This morning we are leaving Hiroshima and heading to Tokyo on the first leg of our journey home. We still have tonight and all day tomorrow to go, but to be honest we are starting to wain a bit and the thought of getting home is beginning to sound appealing. We are on the Nozomi 318 shinkansen which departed from Hiroshima Station at 11.12, one of 3 Tokyo bound express trains leaving within 15 minutes. Each car has 20 rows of 5 seats and there are 16 cars per train, so the service has capacity for approximately 4,500 passengers in a 15 minute period. We are traveling at 296 kmph and it is quite shoogly, so please excuse any spelling mistakes.

The shinkansen experience has changed since I began using them. Traditionally a ticket inspector, wearing a very smart uniform complete with a cap and white gloves, would enter the car, bow and then check everyone's ticket before bowing again on leaving. Sadly this ritual has gone, replaced by automated ticket gates which control entry to the rail network. The frequent food trolley service that used to trundle the length of the train every 30 minutes to loud cries of sumimasen (soo-mee-MAH-sen) has also been discontinued, as the availability of food on station concourses improved, and passengers increasingly bought their supplies before boarding. That change is less of a miss and the cars are much quieter now.

It has been a full and tiring day of travelling, and we finally got something to eat at 4 pm. I'm still not sure if it was a late lunch or an early dinner, but time will tell. We eventually got to our hotel closer to 6 pm and there doesn't seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for leaving the room again. We are in Asakusa, about 4 km north east of our first hotel, but still within the boundary of central Tokyo, and within sight of both the Senso-ji shrine and the Tokyo Sky Tree. While visiting yet another temple, isn't exactly a priority, it was on our original itinerary and it would be a shame not to go, seeing as it's so close. Going to the top of the Sky Tree, the world's highest tower, is definitely on our list for tomorrow, that is provided the clouds are high enough that we can find it. When we arrived tonight, the only hint of it was a disembodied faint glow in the clouds.

Eventually, my inability to keep still got the better of me and I wandered out to try to get some night shots of the tower and surrounding buildings. I'm glad I did as the clouds had lifted and the tower looks so good in the night sky. It was also a really pleasant temperature for a gentle stroll, so much so that I returned to the hotel and rounded up the troops and encouraged them to join me. None of us were particularly hungry but we did manage to find a traditional potato based dish from Japan's farming community and shared that (ok, we had chips from Burger King).Read more