Thu 3 Aug 2006
I’ve gotten a bit behind in postings here, but it has been busy. Diane, Sarah and Zach packed up and said goodbye to Aizu-Wakamatsu and we all got on the train to Kyoto. But on the first leg of the trip, our train stopped a station or two outside of Koriyama, where we were supposed to connect with the bullet train (shinkansen) to Kyoto. We waited, and there were a few announcements, which (of course) we couldn’t understand.
We tried to get some nearby passengers to help us understand what was going on, to no avail. But since no one was moving, I figured we would wait, too. Outside a saw a woman in an HP t-shirt and jeans who looked like a reasonable prospect as an English-speaker. It turns out she was from the Philappines and did speak English! It turns out there was a problem with the signal lights and it would be a while. No telling how long. By then we had missed the train connection and were getting agitated. Next a man in a uniform and a white hard helmet came on board the train, spoke quickly, bowed and left. No one flinched, groaned or moved. I went back to the HP woman and asked her what it all meant. Seem they were arranging busses for us to get to Koriyama. “Why isn’t anyone moving off the train I asked?” She didn’t know. I went back inside, grabbed our bags and headed into the station. I looked over my shoulder and saw that we were leading a line of Japanese. We quickly decided to grab a cab and spend the $50 to get to Koriyama and try to get new tickets to Kyoto. A quick frenzy in the Japan Rail ticket office in Koriyama and we were bounding up the stairs to our train. Except we were on the wrong platform and in the wrong train. Another mad dash across the train station and we made it onto the correct (but inexplcably empty) bullet train to Tokyo. A brief change in Tokyo and we were in Kyoto only and hour or two behind schedule.