Train Trip

my hotel room





Okayama Castle at dawn


I've had the past week off for Obon, which celebrates the dead in Japan. There are tons of festivals all across the country. Two weeks before my Obon holiday, I decided to purchase the "Seishun 18 Nippu" ticket that allows for 5 days of unlimited travel on local trains in Japan....LOCAL TRAINS. Which meant that my itinerary for Tokyo to Hiroshima consisted of 16 hours of train travel...its quite intense. Everything in Japan is intense. The week preceding Obon, I was getting maybe 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night. During this train trip, I slept maybe 2 hours a day...I ended up cutting the trip short for a few reasons...one of them included being delirious with extreme exhaustion. The other included my travel mate; we simply did not get along. Nonetheless, it was WONDERFUL to leave Tokyo and remember that Japan is not only that city....I remember now that Tokyo is quite an absurd mix of sound and vision conjured up in some twelve year old boy's fantasy dream, and lacks any culture dating past twenty years ago. The rest of Japan? Oh right...it consists of TREES and MOUNTAINS and SHRINES that date back thousands of years ago.