3. Wake me up before you Hyogo (aka bad puns and bullet trains)

So the morning that we are supposed to leave for our respective cities, I tell my roommate to wake me up whenever he gets up.  Turns out he was in the military for 5 years and wakes up at 5:30 every day.  It's cool -  I go downstairs and have enough time for two breakfasts before I leave at 8:30.

Before we get on the train, we are sent to buy a boxed at a convenience store in the station.  I tell somebody, "man this all looks super processed."  They then inform me that I am looking at plastic models of the food that I will be buying.  I feel smart already.


Turns out we get to take the bullet train (Shinkansen, for those of you who like words in italics) to our prefecture, Hyogo.  It looks fast even when it's standing still.

More like shin-CAN'T-sen.  Am I right? no? OK sorry.

The train at its fastest goes about 300kph, or one mile every 19 seconds.  The countryside whizzes by so fast it's hard to even look at the houses we go past.  Because the track is raised about 20 feet off the ground often, it kind of looks like I'm in a really low-flying plane.

When we get to the station near Osaka, a man from our prefecture picks us up in his car.  He doesn't really speak English, and we don't really speak Japanese.  I launch into my formal introduction that I was supposed to prepare and memorize, but he cuts me off and makes a joke about how "Nate" sounds like "net" as in "internet," then he calls me "internet-san" for maybe a little longer than it was funny.  At least he will remember my name, I think.  Turns out not.

The board of education is where we go to sign a lot of papers we don't understand.  It's full of dinosaur pictures.  My compatriots (who did more research about this place than me) tell me that dinosaur bones were discovered in Tanba (Tamba? it's spelled different every time) and it's kind of Tanba's only claim to fame.  "Chitan" is our town's mascot.  He is a dinosaur that looks a lot like Barney.  He is striped to apparently represent the layers of dirt from which the dinosaur bones were excavated, and has a plant coming out of his head to represent the surface.

Chitan is everywhere here and endemic to the Tanba region.  The flowers are indigenous to a plastic factory in Taiwan.

Later that day, one of the departing teachers takes us out to dinner at a conveyor belt sushi place, because we don't have any food in our apartments and we have no way to get around.  It is delicious and only a dollar per plate.  We have a computer at our table and we can order plates that will get sent around on the conveyor belt with a marker for our table.  So cool.  To pay, the waitress stacks our plates and uses a measuring tape to figure out how much we owe.

The departing teacher then takes us grocery shopping because she's a saint.  I have no idea what anything is because for some reason they labeled everything in Japanese.  I eventually buy rice, eggs, something that looks like oats, and apples.  Rice is really expensive here for some reason, despite rice fields being everywhere in Tanba:

Yes, downtown is a perfect place for a rice patty that is a third the size of a soccer field.

The next day I realize I have nothing to put on my oats (also they take an hour to cook?  what the heck?) so I dig through what my predecessor left me and find some chocolate sauce.  It's going to be a good year.

Here's a picture of my part of Tanba I took on a short hike:

Photo credits: gojapango.com, me