Saturday September 18, 2010
We woke up at 3 am all bright-eyed and bushy tailed and hungry! The restaurant only opened at 6.30, which under normal circumstances I would never have cared about, but now we had to wait. No mini bars in the room.
When we looked at the city lights the night before there did not seem to be that many skyscrapers, but that morning as watched the sun come up I saw a city of concrete bisected by roads. It had a different feel from Manhattan, which has steel, concrete and lots of glass skyscrapers. What we saw was this mass of tightly packed blocks of different sizes, built mostly from white concrete. Now I could appreciate that space is at a premium in this city.
Finally it was time to go to breakfast and to our surprise the restaurant was busy with tourists who like us were awake very early. Many Japanese hotels provide a buffet that includes both a Japanese breakfast and a Western breakfast. I will write more about that in another post.
After satisfying our hunger with a delicious and tasty Japanese breakfast I longed for my mocha fix. There was a Starbucks in the tower and a clone of every Starbucks barista anywhere in the world served us. The difference being that she, in the Japanese tradition handed us our drinks with a bow, a smile and a thank you, arigato in Japanese! We drank our iced Mocha’s and watched the other people, some with laptops, some in groups chatting like our neighborhood Starbucks at home. Yes I know, I didn’t come to Japan, a tea drinking country, to visit Starbucks, but it did taste so good!
We went to the station to scout out which platform the Shinkansen, (the bullet train) left from and where to buy our tickets, without dragging our suitcases along. It was about 8 am on a Saturday and the station was a hive of activity. Japanese tour groups wound there way around. Young couples walked rapidly and with great purpose to catch their trains to who knows where. Workers headed for the subways and teenagers walked along, eyes glued to their cell phones. I watched one walking towards John and was sure he would bump into him but it was as if he felt his body heat, or could sense his shape, he veered left never lifting his eyes. We returned to the hotel, packed and this time pulling our suitcases went into the correct entrance, bought tickets and went to the platform for the train to Kyoto.
While we waited I noticed a group of women all dressed alike in pink uniforms with white scarves covering their hair, march down the platform then in small groups stand at the entrance of each coach. The train arrived, people disembarked and they entered to clean. While John chatted to another passenger who asked where we were from etc, I watched one cleaner walk down the aisle lifting all the white cloths off the headrests. Another cleaner followed and in perfect rhythm replaced them. In about ten minutes the cleaners lined up and on a signal from the leader, exited the train. She then waited for a signal to exit herself and allow the passenger to board. Off they marched to the next platform and the next train.
Two hours after boarding the train we arrived in Kyoto the ancient capitol of Japan, with its 1600 temples and about 300 shrines. It was very hot and humid and we gratefully got into a cool cab and then into an air-conditioned hotel.
More to follow………
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