Japan: the preamble

The food

I suppose, other than the fear of the strange, the biggest worry we had was with food. At home Chinese food is everywhere, although I know that it is an Anglicised version, but apart from Sushi, what other food do we know comes from Japan?

As it turns out it is strange and delightful, superbly presented and flavoursome as anything I have ever eaten. And yet, the meat all looks the same and come from a sea or land animal, other foodstuffs all are the same shape, but different colours. But what you think might be sweet is instead sharp, or the other way round, or something else entirely.

And then there is chopsticks.

I have hands, that Viz might describe has having fingers like pig's tits. They just don't do what I tell them, and so using chopsticks, is for me, a hit and miss affair, with one day being able to pick out a floating mushroom from a bowl of shabu shabu, and the next now being able to pick anything up. But, in the main, we have muddled through.

On several occasions, we have had banquets, consisting of a dozen or more courses, with meat and vegetables with which you dip on soy sauce, or have pickles to supplement the flavour with. Being confronted with a table covered on bowls, cups, dishes us daunting, and there is no clear place to start. But we have learned that we like some food. A lot. And others not so much, but we will eat conga eel at a push, and raw tuna. Among other things even odder.

But I hope to include some of the menus in the blogs, as we have a load of paper and cards from the trip, with all the details. Stay tuned.

Travel and accommodation

When we booked the holiday, we suggested some of the things we wanted to do and go, the the company did the arranging, providing us with itineraries, accommodation details and directions on how to get from where to there. Also included was a voucher to exchange for a two week pass on Japan Rail, a swipe card to allow us to use public transport through the country, and even a mobile internet device so we could connect the laptop and tablet to stay connected as we moved round the country.

The rail pass gave us almost unlimited use of the rail network, but if we wanted to guarantee that we had seats we had to book the day before or risk it on the day of travel, otherwise use the unreserved portion of the train. This was no problem for us, and we managed to books seats and travel when needed. At major stations, only travel for that day could be booked, or seats reserved anyway.

THe swipe card came with 1500 yen on it, and in the two weeks we topped it up with another 1000 to be sure, that's each. But it is great, and can be used on buses, subway and even to buy food from vending machines.

Bullet trains are fast, 200mph, wide and comfortable, and a delight to use. There are so good, even for me the thrill of using them fades a little.

We did take taxis, which are fairly cheap, as we had the address of each hotel in Japanese provided for us, so we would just show this to the driver before getting in. One thing is that the taxis in japan, all seem to be a very old design, and come from another motoring age, the 80s, but every one is smart and safe.

Public transport is cheap and plentiful in Japan, and you would have to be mad not to use it, and once you know how it works, so easy too.