Let me make something clear from the get go here: I hate trains. It's not a passionate hatred, more a fully formed and utter distaste. Maybe me and trains just got off on the wrong foot. My first railroad experience I was trapped (no I don't think thats too strong a word) in a cramped room with a fermenting balsamic vinaigrette salad watching cars pass the train all the way from Colorado to California. Thats my main beef with the American rail system the cars keep passing you, it's enough to drive a person crazy, how hard is it to make a train that goes at least as fast as the damn highway? That and the damn people who keep trying to summon you to the dining car to buy overpriced craptastic food. I realize this segue is taking longer than anticipated but I have to say, once I woke up at four in the morning in my compartment smelling of vinegar and the train was stopped... thats right full on stopped so the crew could sleep. Call me crazy I paid for non stop service to California. Long story short there is no love or trust in my heart for Amtrack.
All that having been said I make an exception in the dark pit of my hatred for the Japanese rail system (Shinkansen if you want to go native). The trains are pretty comfortable and clean, the people are respectful and quite, and above all these suckers are fast. How fast you ask? How does 200mph suit you? Yeah, thats right cities, and landscape fly by outside the window and those smug cars are left wondering what the hell just hit them. That being said as anyone who has ever been left alone with a pint of Ben and Jerry's and a romantic comedy can tell you there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. This is what we discovered on what I will refer to only as The Day of Epic Travel.
The day Dawned bright and noisy after our shameless carousing the night before. I can't tell you much about what went on that morning since I was in a inebriation induced coma for most of it. I gather people moved around and at one point Mike's girlfriend, who is very pretty by the way, came in and I can only imagine delicately picked her way around our fume belching testosteprone forms.
Also Nate is a hero, I will hear no one say otherwise. He made several runs to the 7-11 braving the all too sunny sunlight in order to get us the necessary provisions and remedies to restore us to the vertical plane. He did not do this because he lost a round of rock paper scissors or got the shortest straw in any sense, but because he's just that good of a guy. That's true heroism, he might as well have fought a grizzly bear with his bare (pun blatantly intended) hands in my mind.
Anyway after our normal morning rituals stretched well into the afternoon and were finally completed we bundled up our stuff, said a fond and grateful farewell to Mike and were off to the train station.
I should make note here that we were traveling (mostly out of Ian's manic need to be going somewhere and doing something) on the final day of one of Japans national holidays. Every hotel everywhere you could possibly think of was full. In retrospect we might have had better luck simply breaking into someones house and sleeping there since apparently no one was actually in their own bed in the entire damn country. Regardless we set off on the train to Hiroshima with nowhere to sleep only the other end, content with in the knowledge that at the very least between the four of us we could probably forcibly evict some poor transient from their cardboard box for the night.
The train was standing room only, a new experience for us. Instead of our normal comfy reserved seats we found ourselves squatting in a line in the hallway outside the bathroom staring longingly at the person who had managed to snake the corner and fallen asleep. Eventually I got that corner. It took me an hour and a half and I only had it for fifteen minute before we got off, but it was awesome.
Getting off the train in Tokyo we decided that Hiroshima with standing room only was a bad idea and we should bail to Osaka for one night. Handily enough there was a train bound for Osaka just leaving we hastily hopped about and gratefully plunked down in the first available seats. There is an old adage patience is a virtue, I say to you now truer words were never spoken, if you ever find yourself taking a train take a moment to survey your environment and choose the best possible seats. We were in the smoking car.
The next two hours would have given a southern baptist preacher a new and detailed view of what hell is. Smoke rolled up in columns from between old wrinkly lips and filled the car with a palpable smog. Occasional coughs and splutters were enough to let you know roughly where the other passengers were and which ones were still breathing, in the very loosest sense of the term. When the train arrived we all emerged smelling vaguely like nicotine jerky and feeling sorry for ourselves but most importantly in one, well I guess technically four, pieces.
The next challenge: Lodging and food for the night.
Solution: Internet parlor and adjacent overpriced eatery.
Now I've been overcharged for a meal but this was every travelers nightmare, so I will touch on it only briefly. The service was awful, all the dishes arrived at different times, the portions were small and expensive, no waiter spoke more than ten words of English, and when the bill came they had magically tacked on 2000 yen for something we didn't order... the water maybe? Anyway glancing around the table we tried to decipher from the others faces whether or not we should pay or fight it. Then I saw Ian reaching for his pen mumbling something about how we would fight this thing in the universal language of mathematics. I quickly paid the bill and we left.
Internet parlors are very cool, we should get some in the states. They are essentially low lit buildings stocked with manga computers and gaming systems. One can rent out booths of various sizes for an allotted amount of time and go to town on pretty much whatever you feel like doing. Some of the larger cubicles have doors and padded floors so you can take a nap... we did not get one of these. Instead we got two of the smallest cubicle available and crammed two people into each one. I would love to say it was an amazing experience but as the night wore on me and Ian fell asleep on the floors of the cubicles (I was later awoken by a clerk and asked to stop snoring, the ass monkey) and Nate and Dane stayed up all night on the computers in what I can only assume was the most badass Internet fiesta of the recent 21st century.
In the morning we awoke bleary eyed and rested to varying degrees, Ian having gotten the most sleep until someone clumsily dropped a set of headphones on his face in the early hours of the morning. We packed up out stuff and I stole enough mini toothbrushes and razors from the bathroom to feel we had really gotten our moneys worth, then we left.
Now as I mentioned before some of us were well under-slept so we decided to take another train to Tokyo just to sleep. We did. I wish I could tell you it was exciting but unless you get off on the image of four men gently snoring for three hours I'm afraid it really wasn't.
We grabbed lunch in Tokyo. The same place the other guys ate before. It really is as good as they said, try the dumplings. Then we hopped on a train back to Osaka, more gentle snoring, and finally to our original destination Hiroshima.
I wish I could tell you that there was a air of solemnity and thought provoking realization as we got off the train into the living monument of what may be the greatest martial blunder in human kind's history. But we were all still very tired and so perhaps the initial magnitude was somewhat lost on us, or at least me. I can tell you the air there was like nothing I've ever smelled before. As a general rule the air in Japan even the cities is pretty clean, I'm from Boulder I should know. But here there was an acidic tang with a slight undertone of gunpowder that seemed to hang about everything. Also walking in the streets felt slightly unsettling, like the feeling you get when you walk through a graveyard.
After a quick tram ride we reached our hostel and introduced ourselves to our attractive coed roommates. As I recall it was something along the lines of:
“Hello beautiful German girl.”
“Hello, how are you?”
“Oh I'm fine, haven't showered in forty eight hours and am dog tired but fine.”
“Thats great! Would you like to come out drinking and do karaoke with me and a few friends?”
“Why sure that would be just dandy! Let me just grab my … zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”
Semper fi.
S.
No comments:
Post a Comment