December 17th

Charles: Today was basically a travel day, we were heading from Takayama in the Mountains to Okayama which is more south than Kobe and near the coast. We woke up, packed up our stuff and walked down the street to the station to get the 9:37 train to Nagoya. We weren't very happy with the ryokan because that morning our fridge locked itself and some of our food inside and I think I lost some earphones somewhere but we were in a hurry so we didn't take it up with the staff.

The train ride back to Nagoya was just as bumpy as going the other way, but we had a nicer time because we were prepared for the hot carriage. The views were really beautiful with the river below and fog falling down valleys above. This trip was just over two hours and we got to Nagoya at 12:00. We've been to Nagoya station a few times now so we headed directly to the shinkansen gates and ordered tickets. We thought that we would need to go further down the line and change to a lower level of shinkansen so we ordered tickets for Kyoto on Hikari 367 departing at 12:11. When we got to the platform (12:05) we saw on the board that Hikari 367 was going to Okayama! Chrissy was skeptical but I argued that we could go back downstairs and ask the man to rebook our tickets for Okayama. We ran down the stairs (me carrying both bags) and managed to get this concept across to the man and got new tickets for the same seats. We got to the platform again just as the train was pulling in, perfect timing hm? Chrissy didn't think so and spent the next few minutes staring me to death.

No trip to Japan is complete without a stressful shinkansen experience.

This train trip was smooth and relaxing and we got a nice view of Himeji castle as we zoomed past. We got to Okayama and 2:15 and wanted to take a taxi to the hotel. We thought this would be easy. Comfort Hotel, we could point to it on a map, it wasn't very far. The taxi driver couldn't understand us saying Ko n fo ru to Ho te ru and couldn't read the english name. Eventually we communicated and he thought it was so amusing that he laughed all the way up the street. We're on the 9th floor of the Comfort Hotel.

Our afternoon was slow because we were tired and Chrissy felt a bit sick. We got some takeaway for lunch and played on the internet. In the evening we went for a walk and found a nice mall with Kinokunia which, even in Japanese, is a fun shop. We tried to find a particular tofu restaurant but as a nice lady explained to us in English, tofu is a morning thing and it's a lunch place so we ate cheap katsu-don instead. Yum.

Chrissy: Chucky bought a fruit salad dessert that he thought would be pear, peach and apricot. It turned out to be pineapple, Something and Something. In jelly.
The hairdryer here actually dried my hair and didn't just warm it!