Traveling Pains: Part 2

21:00 hours and getting later. It was probably around 9:30 by the time we decided to leave the airport for home. Both of us tired and grouchy. It was a long train ride back. When we got to our station, there were no more buses going to our school so we had to ride a taxi back. It was my first time riding a taxi (to my knowledge) and I don’t even remember much of it, I was so tired. Finally, home… already after midnight.

We got up early the next morning because that night before we returned home I had already decided we “were” going to do this trip. This would probably be our last chance to go on any sort of lengthy trip anywhere and I wasn’t going to let it pass. We were taking the Shinkansen!

So if you have never done it, which I hadn’t, the Shinkansen is amazing for long distance. It is a really fast bullet train. If you are scared of flying, but want a similar experience without getting off the ground and maybe taking twice the time (trust me that’s not a lot more time compared to other methods. I’ll tell you about our return trip later, but I’ll just say “9 hours”,) then the Shinkansen is the way to travel. Cost wise it was a little more than plane tickets at around 16,000ish yen or 145ish dollars to ride, but in exchange we didn’t have to worry about a lot of things. We didn’t have to reserve tickets, just buy them as we got on. We didn’t have to go all the way to an airport, just a semi large train station (way more of those.) We didn’t have to fight for a seat, they are all accounted for (not a plane problem, more a train problem. On the other hand, plane problem-wise, there were so many empty seats.) You don’t have to worry about luggage weight, or cost for having extra, although carrying it is all on you because everything is carry-on. And the view is way better. In a plane, you see it from way up as it slowly drifts by, but in the Shinkansen you really feel the speed as buildings zip past at really high speeds. Even trying to take pictures was hard because I had to set the shutter speed really high in order for everything to not be blurred.

Obviously I loved riding the Shinkansen, and I didn’t care that I had to sacrifice a 1-hour flight for a two-hour train ride.

Noon.

We arrived in Himeji. What? Himeji? I thought you guys were visiting your friend in Osaka?

Ok so, yes we were planning on going to Osaka the first day, but that was because we were planning to stay the night at her place and hang out with her in the evenings, but during the day we were going to run around to all kinds of nearby cities. One of the cities we had been considering early on before this trip was Himeji, but there was only one thing we really wanted to see there so it had been scrapped. Now that our first day had been reduced to less than half a day, we decided to add the half-day-jaunt through Himeji castle to the trip. And I’m so glad we did.

Himeji-jo or Himeji castle was amazing, like no really truly amazing. We didn’t know about very many locations to go to in most of the places we went because we didn’t have time to really plan ahead, but the list of places we should go only listed here in Himeji, and I can guess why. As soon as you leave the station it is the first thing you see, and everything else around just disappears after you’ve seen it.

In the distance a large white castle with a brilliantly cloud filled sky, framed by the building in the town leading straight for the castle, nothing to stop or distract you from wanting to just run straight for it like a little kid… except for the long walk.

Next time: Himeji Castle; Walk, Run, or Ride the Bus.