Tokyo Day 13

We made Tokyo ok. Passports were thoroughly examined before they let us out of Russia and before they let us in to Japan. Our route to get to Japan caused a few suspicions amongst Japanese immigration but they let us in. Phew what a culture change! Our first challenge was getting to our
hotel about 40 miles from the airport. The Bureau de Change was closed at Narita airport (!)and there don't seem to be any cash machines that worked with our cards in the stations or main thoroughfares. Fortunately we had Japanese rail passes we bought in the UK and a couple of good maps (Stanford's:Explore, Discover, Inspire) so by trundling our cases through the streets of night time Tokyo managed to find the hotel. Must admit we were a bit dehydrated by the time we got there (being unable to buy any water in this rather humid city) we did take full advantage of the mini bar! Our adventure had not finished for the day yet; one more surprise. The combined bidet/toilet with instructions in Japanese only!

Managed to get cash this morning from the local post office adjacent to hotel so all well. What lovely people the Japanese are! Courteous, willing to help and quite forgiving of our lack of knowledge of Japanese customs and language. (English is not as widely spoken as I imagined but the Japanese we have met make
every effort to communicate in whatever way they can)
The railway stations are huge and we are about 15 mins walk from Shinagawa station which is about twice the size of New St Birmingham but only about a quarter the size of Tokyo Central. We can see the Shinkansen high speed trains from our room.(see pic)

Trains need reservations in Japan so we went to Shinagawa station station to book our "Rural Ride to Iida" And despite the technology at the helpful reservation clerks finger tips and the fact I had written out the reservations I required neither the computer system or she, personally, had ever heard of the place. She had to resort to an old map directory of stations in a book about the size of an old telephone directory. A map of the railways of Japan is a bit like looking at a picture of a plate of spaghetti so we both looked over the maps. I showed her roughly were it was and she interpreted the place names from the Japanese characters. Eventually we found it and got our reservations. The transaction must have taken 30 minutes and reservations are free so no money exchanged hands. But such is the Japanese sense of service this didn't seem to worry anyone a bit.