31/05: Shanghai - Hiroshima (Japan, part 1 of 2)
Hello again!
Good heavens, it has been a long, long while since we updated our story here, and we regret it much. I guess it has to do with the higher pace we keep in Japan, and the lower public availability and higher costs of internet kept us from taking the time to write our stories down. This time too, we have but half an hour left to blog, so we will have to apply a low resolution :).
On the 1st of May we departed from the huge Chinese Shanghai on the ferry to Osaka, Japan. After some last minute improvised money exchange on the black market (the banks appeared unexpectedly closed, you can't exchange Chinese money outside China, and the taxi was way cheaper than expected) we boarded the boat 10 minutes before it left. Hardened travellers as we had become, and having already checked in half an hour before this, we felt perfectly at ease with this planning, but the many nervous urging and repeatedly head-shaking ferry officers clearly had a different view on this.
The boat trip took about 48 hours and was possibly one of the best long-distance travel experiences in our whole trip. We spent much time on the outer decks were the sun was shining, the ocean and sky stretched out all around us, and we in the 2nd half of the trip we could gaze at the many islands bordering Japan's coast. There was free breakfast (with coffee!) and English-language movies showing all day. And most importantly, we met two miraculously friendly people with whom we enjoyed most of our time. These were Julien and Fumiko, a twentysomething Swiss and Japanese couple who returned to Japan after travelling in Scandinavia, Swiss and a bit of China. We quickly became friends with these two extremely friendly and open and happy people, and they invited us to visit them in Hokkaido, Japans most northern island.
They also helped starting up in Japan when we arrived in Osaka on Thursday in the middle of Golden Week, the most busy holiday of the year. Fumiko became our temporary instant travel agent and guided us through the subways and trainstations, phonecards, foreign-money ATM's, reservations and route descriptions for our hostel. This was pleasantly luxurous, since in about an hour she helped us with what usually takes us half a day to find out ourselves.
Our first hours in Japan were hours of nearly continous amazement. As we found our way between the immense crowds in Osaka station, we were impressed by the immensely hip clothing style of the people, the fully automatic ticket machines and gates, the abundant English subtitles, the constant friendliness and correctness of the Japanese, and above all the high-tech toilet seat in the restaurant where we had lunch.
This toilet seat is perhaps the best indication of the general state of advanced technology which the Japanese country kept amazing us with. This state does not show itself in extremely futuristic appearances, but in the many pracitcal details of everyday life. Like, as I said, the toilet seat. Not only is it heated, it also offers deodorant, a water spray to wash your behind from several angles, and a dry-blower to get things dry again. Temperature and spray intensity can be adjusted by buttons in a panel in the armrest or on the wall. Moreover, you can make the seat make artifical flushing sounds, apparently for psychological stimulation of your internal toilet processes. Although these facilities are only found in the more luxurous of toilet spots, visiting the toilet can be quite a feast in Japan. (And quite exciting if the buttons are only in Japanese.)
The other thing that quite soon struck us is the very helpfull attitude of the Japanese. Asking directions to a subway entry may result in the helper crushing his just-lit cigarette and walking ten minutes with you to drop you off at the right spot - only to turn around and walk all the way back since he was apparently not going there himself afterl all. It is not only politeness that seems to drive them, the Japanese people often show a genuine care for us, as if we are two children lost in a big alien world. (Which, ofcourse, we perhaps are a little after all.) This is really heartwarming. Especially when we are quite tired and stretching our energy to find some curiously hidden target, this neverending friendliness always keeps us smiling.
Back to Osaka. Since everything in the city was booked completely full because of Golden Week, we spent the first day in the area around a youth hostel two hours from Osaka. We enjoyed our first Onsen (Aniek will later explain this Japanese bath) and had fun in an amusement park that we just couldn't pass, since all its attractions were themed around bicycles - rollercoaster with pedals in each wagon, a big area with all bizar kinds of bicycles, etcetera. Brilliant, in our opinion, and cleverly putting some sports into amusement. The next day we travelled on to Osaka downtown, which was a gentle introduction to Japanese cities: not very many sights, but a lot of citylife to experience. We gazed endlessly at the beautifull outfits both men and females wear (black and white is the current fashion) and had lunch among sushi eating families in the city park. Feeling there was a lot more of Japan to see, we went on the next day to nearby Kyoto.
This old city and one time capital is absolutely great, and worth more days than the three we spent there. Modern and ancient style are in harmony here. The Kyoto station building is an experience by itself, with its huge hall of complex architecture, escalators taking you sky-high across the hall to the sky-bridge ending in a roof terrace which provides tremendous views over the city. But only 10 minutes by bus gets you to one of Kyoto's many temples where the city seems to vanish as soon as you pass its gate, leaving you between wide, pleasant gardens, open-spaced temple buildings with solemn, mind-easing colours and structures. There is much room for nature and simplicity in the Japanese temples, which strongly appeals to us, giving the places a very pleasant and intense atmosphere even we do not know much about the religious details.
Alas, time is running out already, so I will remain with a summary of the rest of our trip. Since we had got it into our enthousiastic heads to see both the very south and very north of Japan, we jumped in one day from Kyoto to Kagoshima, in southern Kyushu. This involved using the shinkansen - Japan's high speed (200 km/h) bullet trains, which proved to make for a delightfull comfortable journey following a meticulous Japanese on-time schedule without any hurry or delays, in a comfort level nowhere found in Dutch trains (or stations). After taking a volcanic sand bath (up till your chin in blasting hot sand) we moved back North, making a sidetrip to Aso volcano, a beautifull nature area with bare steaming mountains, forests, the delights of camping (we bought a tent in Kagoshima) and an extreme example of Japanese friendliness: a man stopping his car to check if we were lost, helping us to the camping and, after picking up his daughter from school, taking us by car around the area and into the Aso volcano park. He even called his wife to invite us to his house in Kumamoto because he felt the weather would be wet that night...
The camping was a pleasant and excellent break in the Japanese pace we had set ourselves, and had re-energized us to continue on to Fukuoka/Hakata, a trendy hip place where we spent the night to go out in the hip downtown area, meeting a friendly guy from South-Africa with whom we talked the night away (while behind us a few Japanese were making a lot of drunk noise at the pool table). Since we had decided to that we definitely wanted to visit Julien and Fumiko in Hokkaido, we only roamed around for another afternoon before again hopping in the Shikansen to Hiroshima, where Marjolijn hosted us with a hospitality way nothing short of the Japanese... :)
(continued by Aniek in the next post)
Good heavens, it has been a long, long while since we updated our story here, and we regret it much. I guess it has to do with the higher pace we keep in Japan, and the lower public availability and higher costs of internet kept us from taking the time to write our stories down. This time too, we have but half an hour left to blog, so we will have to apply a low resolution :).
On the 1st of May we departed from the huge Chinese Shanghai on the ferry to Osaka, Japan. After some last minute improvised money exchange on the black market (the banks appeared unexpectedly closed, you can't exchange Chinese money outside China, and the taxi was way cheaper than expected) we boarded the boat 10 minutes before it left. Hardened travellers as we had become, and having already checked in half an hour before this, we felt perfectly at ease with this planning, but the many nervous urging and repeatedly head-shaking ferry officers clearly had a different view on this.
The boat trip took about 48 hours and was possibly one of the best long-distance travel experiences in our whole trip. We spent much time on the outer decks were the sun was shining, the ocean and sky stretched out all around us, and we in the 2nd half of the trip we could gaze at the many islands bordering Japan's coast. There was free breakfast (with coffee!) and English-language movies showing all day. And most importantly, we met two miraculously friendly people with whom we enjoyed most of our time. These were Julien and Fumiko, a twentysomething Swiss and Japanese couple who returned to Japan after travelling in Scandinavia, Swiss and a bit of China. We quickly became friends with these two extremely friendly and open and happy people, and they invited us to visit them in Hokkaido, Japans most northern island.
They also helped starting up in Japan when we arrived in Osaka on Thursday in the middle of Golden Week, the most busy holiday of the year. Fumiko became our temporary instant travel agent and guided us through the subways and trainstations, phonecards, foreign-money ATM's, reservations and route descriptions for our hostel. This was pleasantly luxurous, since in about an hour she helped us with what usually takes us half a day to find out ourselves.
Our first hours in Japan were hours of nearly continous amazement. As we found our way between the immense crowds in Osaka station, we were impressed by the immensely hip clothing style of the people, the fully automatic ticket machines and gates, the abundant English subtitles, the constant friendliness and correctness of the Japanese, and above all the high-tech toilet seat in the restaurant where we had lunch.
This toilet seat is perhaps the best indication of the general state of advanced technology which the Japanese country kept amazing us with. This state does not show itself in extremely futuristic appearances, but in the many pracitcal details of everyday life. Like, as I said, the toilet seat. Not only is it heated, it also offers deodorant, a water spray to wash your behind from several angles, and a dry-blower to get things dry again. Temperature and spray intensity can be adjusted by buttons in a panel in the armrest or on the wall. Moreover, you can make the seat make artifical flushing sounds, apparently for psychological stimulation of your internal toilet processes. Although these facilities are only found in the more luxurous of toilet spots, visiting the toilet can be quite a feast in Japan. (And quite exciting if the buttons are only in Japanese.)
The other thing that quite soon struck us is the very helpfull attitude of the Japanese. Asking directions to a subway entry may result in the helper crushing his just-lit cigarette and walking ten minutes with you to drop you off at the right spot - only to turn around and walk all the way back since he was apparently not going there himself afterl all. It is not only politeness that seems to drive them, the Japanese people often show a genuine care for us, as if we are two children lost in a big alien world. (Which, ofcourse, we perhaps are a little after all.) This is really heartwarming. Especially when we are quite tired and stretching our energy to find some curiously hidden target, this neverending friendliness always keeps us smiling.
Back to Osaka. Since everything in the city was booked completely full because of Golden Week, we spent the first day in the area around a youth hostel two hours from Osaka. We enjoyed our first Onsen (Aniek will later explain this Japanese bath) and had fun in an amusement park that we just couldn't pass, since all its attractions were themed around bicycles - rollercoaster with pedals in each wagon, a big area with all bizar kinds of bicycles, etcetera. Brilliant, in our opinion, and cleverly putting some sports into amusement. The next day we travelled on to Osaka downtown, which was a gentle introduction to Japanese cities: not very many sights, but a lot of citylife to experience. We gazed endlessly at the beautifull outfits both men and females wear (black and white is the current fashion) and had lunch among sushi eating families in the city park. Feeling there was a lot more of Japan to see, we went on the next day to nearby Kyoto.
This old city and one time capital is absolutely great, and worth more days than the three we spent there. Modern and ancient style are in harmony here. The Kyoto station building is an experience by itself, with its huge hall of complex architecture, escalators taking you sky-high across the hall to the sky-bridge ending in a roof terrace which provides tremendous views over the city. But only 10 minutes by bus gets you to one of Kyoto's many temples where the city seems to vanish as soon as you pass its gate, leaving you between wide, pleasant gardens, open-spaced temple buildings with solemn, mind-easing colours and structures. There is much room for nature and simplicity in the Japanese temples, which strongly appeals to us, giving the places a very pleasant and intense atmosphere even we do not know much about the religious details.
Alas, time is running out already, so I will remain with a summary of the rest of our trip. Since we had got it into our enthousiastic heads to see both the very south and very north of Japan, we jumped in one day from Kyoto to Kagoshima, in southern Kyushu. This involved using the shinkansen - Japan's high speed (200 km/h) bullet trains, which proved to make for a delightfull comfortable journey following a meticulous Japanese on-time schedule without any hurry or delays, in a comfort level nowhere found in Dutch trains (or stations). After taking a volcanic sand bath (up till your chin in blasting hot sand) we moved back North, making a sidetrip to Aso volcano, a beautifull nature area with bare steaming mountains, forests, the delights of camping (we bought a tent in Kagoshima) and an extreme example of Japanese friendliness: a man stopping his car to check if we were lost, helping us to the camping and, after picking up his daughter from school, taking us by car around the area and into the Aso volcano park. He even called his wife to invite us to his house in Kumamoto because he felt the weather would be wet that night...
The camping was a pleasant and excellent break in the Japanese pace we had set ourselves, and had re-energized us to continue on to Fukuoka/Hakata, a trendy hip place where we spent the night to go out in the hip downtown area, meeting a friendly guy from South-Africa with whom we talked the night away (while behind us a few Japanese were making a lot of drunk noise at the pool table). Since we had decided to that we definitely wanted to visit Julien and Fumiko in Hokkaido, we only roamed around for another afternoon before again hopping in the Shikansen to Hiroshima, where Marjolijn hosted us with a hospitality way nothing short of the Japanese... :)
(continued by Aniek in the next post)
