Too Many Slugs

I guess it's been a while since my last update, huh? We spent a couple days not doing a whole lot, but we had a very fun weekend! Saturday morning we got up super early (well, super early for me - 5:30am) to get ready and head down to Shinagawa Station for 7:30 because we had an important train to catch at 8:10. But we ended up getting to the station at 7:20, with plenty of time to catch an earlier train, so by 7:40, we were on the Hikari shinkansen bound for Osaka~

For those of you who don't know, the shinkansen is the famous "bullet train" that can get you to quite a few destinations in Japan in the shortest amount of time. The one we were on can travel at speeds of close to 180mph. So the 315 mile trip takes only about 3 hours (because there are about 5 stops in between). That's not even the fastest train, which can do the trip (with fewer stops) in 2 hours and 25 minutes. It was a pretty smooth ride through the countryside, and for the first time on our trip, we saw mountains! We even ended up going through quite a few tunnels in them. And we finally made it to Osaka at 10:30.

What were we in Osaka for, you may ask? To meet up with my friend Courtney and see *pnish* again! We went to see the last two performances of Samurai Mode (with 2nd and 5th row seats, respectively) and it was even better this time around since we were so close to the stage. I could see it another 3 times and still not get tired of it. I'm a little sad it's finally over. After the show, we waited around with about 30 other girls for the guys to come out (which I swear is not at all as creepy as you may think) so we could congratulate them on a job well done, and since we were the only three foreigners standing there in a group, two of the guys who saw us seemed pretty surprised and excited to see us, which was very cool.

After that, we headed back to Courtney's place (about an hour outside of Osaka) to spend the night and we were up and off again by noon Sunday. We had to wait a while for the train that would take us into Maibara, where we were catching the shinkansen, since it was running about 20 minutes late. So I snapped some pictures while we waited!

Lovely, super scenic Minami Hikone station. There were some mountains (which you can sorta see just to the right of the tomatoes on that sign) but unfortunately, it was hard to get a good shot of them from where we were standing.

Here's Cinnamon summing up her feelings about Minami Hikone. Despite it raining on the walk to the station, it was hot and muggy and she was hungry and the train was late, so she was not impressed by this little town.
Luckily, the train finally came shortly after and took us to Maibara, where she had a drink and a snack while we waited another 50 minutes for the shinkansen.

See? Much happier... if a little tired. There wasn't much worth seeing in Maibara near the station either. However, we did see about 5 Nozomi shinkansen (they're the fastest ones) that whizzed right by the station going super fast. Cinnamon tried to get a picture of one, but by the time she turned her camera on and put it in the right mode, it was long gone.

More waiting. (That's my "I'm looking at the camera, but don't know a picture is being taken" face. Sadly, this was better than the other picture she took of me). Since I'm sure you're getting tired of random shots of us and station signs, I'll show you a little bit of what we got to see from the shinkansen.

Mountains! And also some rice paddies and houses. The weather was pretty cloudy and rainy (in case that's not obvious), so it was impossible to get a good shot of the mountains, as they wanted to hide behind the clouds. I think this was taken somewhere between Maibara and Gifu-Hashima.

More mountains, possibly somewhere between Gifu-Hashima and Nagoya. I apologize for the blurriness, but when you're taking pictures out a window on a train going 180mph, things are gonna be blurry.

And lastly, the two of us on the shinkansen. We were quite happy to discover there was easily 3 times the legroom as what we had on our flight to Japan, so it was a pretty enjoyable ride.

When we got back in to Tokyo, it was raining, so we stayed in for the night. Today we caught up on sleep and went to the grocery store. Exciting, I know. No idea what's in store for us tomorrow, possibly checking out a big 100 yen shop? We'll see.

In case you were wondering about the subject of this post, within the past two days, we have found 6 slugs in our room. They only seem to come in when it's raining (as you may remember from before), and we don't know exactly how they get in, but we assume they're crawling in from under the sliding glass door. Thankfully slugs are harmless and very much not scary, but they're better left outside, that's for sure.

Now it's bedtime for me, so I'll keep in touch with you all later. Please let us know if you're reading the posts so we know you haven't all forgotten about us already! And if there's anything in particular you want to see a picture of, we'll do our best to get a shot of it for you.