First Day alone

Well today was my first real day alone. It was interesting. I got up at 9:00 and went to Nikko, a temple complex I thought was 40min outside of Tokyo. It turned out it was about 2 hours away. So much for planning. I took a very nice JR train there, and paid dearly for it. Although the seats were nice enough to nap in so it was totally worth it. When I got there I spent 20min walking up hill to the temples because all the buses were full. Today was a national holiday so everyone and their mother was out and about. The temples were nice, but without any English guides I couldn't really understand what was going on. I got some nice pictures though. I'll post those up on facebook later tonight. Sadly there wasn't any photography allowed in any of the cool places so I only got the outsides of lots of the buildings. Over all though I'd say it was worth the trip. It was a nice break from the city. It was great to see some of Japans natural areas. Although I guess I'll be seeing a lot of that for the next few days.

The on the way back I stopped off at the Gaman-Ga-Fuchi Abyss that Olga recommended. I totally see why she did. It was the perfect counterpoint to all the temples in Nikko. This was just a small place with lots of little Buddhas in a row. It was a nice end to the day.

The way back at that point got a bit interesting. As I was taking the 40min walk back to the train station I ran into a friendly Japanese school boy. We tried to talk in Japanese for a bit, but it didn't work out. He wanted to talk about baseball and the Mariners, which I can't understand when its talked about in English and when he was taking about some pitcher that I didn't know the name of with a very thick Japanese accent I just got lost. Nice guy though. Thankfully I ran into a bus headed for the station about 15min into my walk. I got to the station at 6 or 7ish. I forget exactly when now. I looked at the schedule and saw the next train wasn't for an hour. Dejected I went to go buy a ticket only to find out another train was leaving for the station I wanted to go to in 10min. I couldn't believe my good luck. I happily got on the train. One hour later I remembered something Ms. Alexander had told me when we were going to a school in between Kyoto and Osaka. “If want you can take a local train from Kyoto to Tokyo, it will just take you 16 hours”. Thats when I realized I had gotten on a limited express. One level faster than a local train. An hour and a half after that I arrived back in Tokyo. I've got to learn to plan better. Anyway that was about the day. Tomorrow is going to be spent in transit mostly. Although I'm going to try and visit the Imperial Palace, and maybe do one last shopping run to Harajyuku if I have the time. Possibly no blog updates for the next 2 days. I don't know the amenities in my next hostel.