It's amazing how integral 7-Elevent is to Japanese life. 7-Elevens are everywhere and you can buy the craziest stuff in them: sushi rolls, rice balls filled with salted plum or salmon, all kinds of hot and cold teas, minor electronics, yada, yada. Whenever we're in Japan, I have a rice ball from 7-Eleven pretty much every day. And on this trip, I discovered lightly sweetened plain yogurt from Meiji Dairy that is to die for. As the name implies, it's not too sweet, it's got a tartness that is usually processed out of American yogurt and it's wonderfully creamy. Yum.
Here's CJ holding up a natto roll, which Maki adores. CJ and I think natto is stinky.
After packing everything up, we caught a cab to Tokyo station. We met Maki's parents at 10:30 so we would have an hour to buy food for the train and then get on the shinkanesen. We got a bunch of yummy food, including all kinds of nigiri sushi, enari and chirashi sushi. The train was scheduled to leave at 11:30 and it did. You can set your clock by the trains, which run so efficiently.
Here we all are on the platform, waiting for the shinkansen to go to Kyoto.
Here's Maki with his awesome sushi lunch.
We took the shinkansen to Kyoto and then transferred to a local train to Nara. I guess Nara is not served by the shinkansen. We love the trains in Japan, but especially the shinkansen. When we bought our rail passes in the US, we paid the extra $70 per person to green the green pass, which gives us reserved seats on the shinkanses, an additional luxury on what can be crowded trains.
It took 2 1/2 hours to get to Kyoto, we waited a half hour or so in Nara, then 45 minutes on the local train to get to Nara. By 3:30pm, we were walking out of the Nara station to our ryokan, or Japanese guesthouse.
No comments:
Post a Comment