DAY 348: "I'm quite envious that you're going to Kyoto," Liz confessed to me at the dining table that morning. She had lived in Japan for five odd years, but had never made it out to tour the former Imperial capital. I supposed Liz exhibited the same behavior found in most people -- to not tour the home country. (Besides, a flight and a week's stay in Thailand was cheaper than spending a weekend in Kyoto.)

I didn't yet have the ticket for Kyoto just yet, but Liz came with me to the JR office to organize the seat reservation to Kyoto, beyond and back, a trip that would take six days while I was "stuck in Japan" waiting for my visa to process at the Indian embassy. The ticket agent managed to figure a way to discount the itinerary, but it required me passing the conductor this additional ticket that Liz couldn't understand. Hiroshi translated the agent's explanation over the phone and everything was good in the end.* As The Beatles once sang, "I get by with a little help from my friends."

Liz left for work while I went to arrange more tickets, this time for planes, not trains. I was recommended Hit Travel, a travel agency with offices all around Tokyo; in the Ebisu branch I met Tandin, a friendly Bhutanese guy who told me, like others who had wrote me from in Katmandu, that all the violence in Nepal has been overly exaggerated by the media. He recommended not flying to Katmandu directly from Tokyo not for safety reasons, but for money reasons; it'd be a lot cheaper to fly to Bangkok and get tickets from there. He put me on a waiting list on the cheapest flight to Bangkok and all I could do was wait.

* _{For those using this Blog as research for their own trip to Japan, don't buy tickets this way -- you MUST get a JR Railpass before you enter Japan for unlimited travel in X amount of time at a much cheaper price (like the Eurailpass in Europe). If I had known better (I might have, but writing this Blog sucked away all my free time for research), I might have saved hundreds of dollars!}

FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET IS SOMETHING that might rival the speed of Superman: the Shinkansen, more commonly known by foreigners as Japan's "bullet train" -- and with good reason, because the head car does look like a bullet (picture above), a bullet from the future that is. At speeds of up to 270 km/hr, the bullet train zooms people between the major Japanese cities faster than you can say "blueberry pancakes."

...

Well, not that fast, but pretty fast. Unlike old traditional railway tracks, the rails on the Shinkansen are welded together in a continuous way, allowing the train a super fast, super smooth ride that gives you the sensation of flying in a jet plane -- there hasn't been a fatality yet since its beginnings. Actually, when a train leaves a station it feels like when you're in a plane accelerating down the runway for takeoff, only this vehicle never leaves the ground; it stays at that take-off speed and only goes faster until the next station. For some people, the experience is nauseating and causes vertigo, but that could probably be avoided by not looking out the window. Perhaps riding the bullet train inspired anime's speed line effect because entire neighborhoods whizzed by in seconds, entire cities in minutes. In a couple of hours later I found myself before I knew it in Kyoto station.

MODERN KYOTO, AS LONELY PLANET DESCRIBES, is "just like any modern Japanese city," which was true when I left the station and saw the familiar shops, restaurants and pachinko parlors. Like Tokyo, Kyoto had no shortage of Starbucks -- the Japanese calls them "Sta Ba" -- but the point of me leaving Tokyo wasn't to see a familiar scene of Iced Cafe Lattés (grande) and Matcha Cream (green tea) Frappucinos (venti). Instead, I had made a reservation at a hostel in the northwestern suburbs, an area known to be full of old temples and shrines. Coffee there came out of one of the vending machines (seen on almost every street corner in all of Japan).

A public bus took me to the "Yusu Hostero-mae" stop ("Youth Hostel" in a Japanese accent) away from the madness of the city. No neon, no electronic chimes, no street noise; in fact I actually heard crickets. In the hostel's backyard was a little serene garden. Walking inside, I reentered in the familiar backpacker scene of beer, labeling your juice in the shared refrigerator and pimply teenagers -- a scene I hadn't been in for the past three weeks while staying with ex-pats. Everything came back to me, except for that Japanese rule of not wearing your shoes indoors (they provided slippers).

That night, along with other travelers and members of an Australian high school class on a big field trip, I made yatsuhashi, a sweet doughy desert indigenous to the Kyoto region. Kai, one of the girls at the hostel, set up the ingredients for people to use, and guided us on the creation of it: mixing, kneading, microwaving, rolling and flavoring. The end result was desert dough with cinnamon and the consistency of pre-chewed gum, cut into strips. Mine came out really sloppy, but tasty nonetheless.

With homemade cinnamon treats in my stomach and the sounds of crickets outside, I felt it was great to get out of Japanese city life for a while. No wonder why Liz felt envious.