In Fukuoka now!

Arrived at 15:44. As the ticket said. Shinkansen seems to be just about as punctual as an atomic clock, read somewhere that their best year with the Shinkansen had 12 seconds delay from the timetable, in total, for all Shinkansen... That could obviously be just another urban myth, but the trains seem to be really really fast, and punctual. And it's not just the trains. It's like the whole system around them too. At the station all the doors for the trains are marked on the platforms, and the trains stop within centimeters of those markings. And there's markings as to where to stay and wait for the train to stop too, so all the people can exit the train before you board it.

At the final stops, like here in Fukuoka or at the starting platform in Tokyo cleaning crews enter the train after it's stopped and emptied. There's about 20 minutes or so in the schedule calculated for the cleaning. For a whole train. That's 8 wagons on the Hikari Railstar, or 12 on the Hikari. They also change the direction the seats are facing, since obviously you'd be wasting valuable time if you'd have to go turn the train around, and who'd ever want to sit facing away from the travel direction... So, train stops, people get out and these old ladies in pink uniforms get onboard, and like clockwork they take those pieces of paper on the pillows, although they atleast on the Railstar from Osaka to Fukuoka were actually some kind of linen, then they work like robots and clean the train up. As in there's like 3 people per wagon cleaning it.... And it looks like new after that 15 to 20 minutes... Really freaky, I should prolly import one of those ladies to clean up my apartment, have her locked down in the basement and then give her 5 minutes a day to clean the 2 floors.

Then there were the saleswagons on the train. The woman selling stuff would bow everytime she entered the wagon, and she'd excuse herself like that too when she left. Every time, like every half hour for the wagon I was at....

But enough typing for now,I'm hungry and there seems to be some convinience store at the road on the other side of the block, and there was some cheap food place too, so it's prolly time to do the first attack into Fukuoka, see what we come up with. And I don't have maps of the place either, so chances are a small backtrack to Fukuoka's train station is in order to hit the Tourist info there for all the good stuff. bbl.