Erek Speed

I’m back with more interesting tales of my time in the land of the rising sun.

The first thing I’m going to talk about is trains because they’re awesome and thus worth mentioning.

Japan has pretty incredibly figured out how to make the trains run on time, even without being fascist or italian.  So every subway and regular train always comes on time to the minute unless theirs been an accident.

That is to say, there’s a marquee at the station that lists the train and the minute it will come.  You wait there and it comes at that time or before.  It leaves when it’s supposed to leave.  Being the efficiency hack that I am, I can’t help but love such a system.  Trains I can accurately plan a schedule around.  Pretty awesome.

The standardization is also pretty awesome as well.  For the shinkansen and other long distance trains, (even some city trains)  tell you where to stand to get into the correct car, and you stand there, and that’s where your car is when the train comes.  This is true on countless numbers of stations on numerous different trains.  Everything works so much better when your country acts as one instead of a bunch of separate selfish entities.  Stupid federalism.

It was by such a system that I arrived in Kyoto, and while in the station I was able to grab some authentic Japanese ramen, which was good as one might expect.  A full meal, not the stuff you get in the states of course.  But actual goodness.

Kyoto is a pretty cool place as well.  There’s all sorts of history and stuff, which is important because history is from the past, and we all know that that shit repeats itself.  In this case, any day now, people are going to go on a temple and castle and shrine building frenzy, just like they did in the past  Be prepared.

Today (Thursday), I saw a pretty cool castle, and a cool “Golden Pavilion”  riding the buses around is pretty awesome, especially now that I understand how they work.  Unfortunately, not in an efficient way.  Usually you throw your money in the top.  But that only accepts exact change ( I’ve lost like 250 this way) it steals your money.

If you want change you have to put your money in a separate slot which is just for making change.  It seems like if you have put both functionality into the same box, you could use just one slot.  I just can’t imagine the reasoning behind separating it.

In any case, this evening I went to club and heard loud music and also saw giant bond fires lit in the shape of chinese characters, and also possibly a shrine gate, but that one was fuzzier.

Tomorrow is the Imperial Palace, and maybe some rafting, we’ll see.