Day 5 Part 1 Wednesday 2025 05 21 Travel to Kyoto

 It's finally time to leave Kyoto via shinkansen (aka, bullet train, minus the stylish assassin's and Brad Pitt, obviously). I am pretty excited about this. Nothing illustrates the utter Japanese dominance of public transport on the world stage than a train that goes faster than anyone who isn't sponsored by Pirelli tires would consider going. 

We, as seems the pattern, just buy food from the corner store for our meal. So as to keep the patina of 'hey, we're travelling' alive we make sure to buy things we couldn't buy in Canada. Protein milk! Pancakes prepackaged with jam and butter! Onigiri (rice balls with protein mixed in there)! It's a cultural experience. The best? No. Instagrammable? No. Cultural enough for our family? Apparently!

So we check out of our hotel, the lobby being on the second floor and packed with vending machines reinforcing the Japan-ness of it all, and hurry along our trip. 

This lobby, as I said, is on the second floor, and it has other stuff going for it other than the fantastic parquet floor and vending machines full of Pocari sweat. It's got those fake flowers which are more confusing than anything, those chairs in front that is too close to the desk and that everyone just awkwardly leans over to talk to the front desk, and that incredibly technological whizeromajidoo thing on the ceiling there. It might only be the air conditioning but it also might be something fanTASTIC and frankly I'd just like to keep the mystery alive there.

A few train transitions, during rush hour. This is really travelling on hard-mode, in case you are wondering. You know when you are taking transit and waiting for the flood of people to ebb a little to cross a hallway, or do something that requires a little more room than the exact amount of space it takes to spin in place? Well, at Tokyo station, that ebb never comes. Only more people in more of a rush than the other people you let pass by. Learning the whole zipper merge thing is key here. 

At some point we had to go from pillar to pillar. Like, take a break at a pillar so we didn't lose one of the family. And these are all older teenagers. I cannot fathom how anyone would do this with small children or tweens. Leashes? An air horn as backup? Attaching one of those flimsy flag poles with the tiny flag at the top you put on tricycles? 

On top of that is mere navigation from one line to the other, because, as you'd expect of a megacity, the train line system is... complex. Star at this diagram too long and I swear you'll start to see the Matrix, or take an unhealthy interest in advanced mathematics.

We grab some food, there are innumerable shops all selling lovely looking bento boxes and besides the delight there is the grudging bitterness that folks in Tokyo get to eat like this at every lunch hour, when in a RUSH. North America gets McGriddles, those pancake and process meat product monstrosities, and Japan gets THIS. 

We somehow don't lose any of the children and get aboard the shinkansen. It's spacious and seemingly ordinary, but then it started moving.

The train moves at about 280km/h, as measured by my phone. It's, fast. And it's not like a plane where you can eventually lose all frame of reference and just be sitting in a loud but generally motionless tube. No. There is the vibration, first of all, the kind that you only get by hurtling past any sense of safety speed and right into shinkansen speed. Then there is the landscape that is always HURTLING by. You never escape the feeling that you are moving, very close to the ground, in a train, of all things.

The most telling indicator of speed, however, is the fact that as the train has to turn and make course corrections through it's path, the rail is actually canted, or maybe the train leans somehow? But you can see the horizon dip as the train leans into these gentle curves. Well, they'd be gentle curves if we weren't going a QUARTER THE SPEED OF SOUND. Every minute sitting in that train, looking out the window is like being in a 90's extreme sports action movie. Not so prevalent now, young readers, but in the 90's extreme sports was a real thing. Snowboarding, base jumping, surfing, maybe? And all action movies involved a sequence of it, if not outright forming the entire movie around it. So sitting on the train felt like that. I felt I should be slamming a red bull and saying 'bro', a lot.

Even walking to the bathroom involves engaging your core and walking slightly wide-legged like a company man who has had to keep up, shot for shot, with his client who really wanted to tie one on and is too old and too rich to worry about things such as liver cancer or alcoholic comas.

We take another, ordinary train to get closer to our hotel. It has velour seats. This might be an attempt to emphasize the old timey-ness of Kyoto? Or maybe boasting the fact that Kyoto is so well maintained they can risk having velour in public transit. I feel like I'm on a train, in Vienna, going to a palace, at a time when trains were as rare as helicopter rides. I also feel vaguely like a too well dressed officer is about to stop me and menacingly ask for my papers. Velour does that I guess.

We finally make it to Kyoto, and prepare to hoof it to our hotel. Thankfully the entire trip involved no stylish assassin or Brad Pitt.