To Kyoto

After breakfast, Noriko took me to Hayashima Station. There were three stations within driving range, and although I had arrived at Chayamachi Station aboard the JR Marine Liner the day before, today I caught the JR Marine Liner from Hayashima Station, which was one stop “closer” to Okayama Station. The Marine Liner doesn’t always stop at that station though, it sometimes skips it, but it did this time (and on my return trip), and Shuji and Noriko knew this from the train schedule, which they were always well on top of. For me, it was just a fun new station, one of dozens that I had visited now on this whirlwind trip.

It was an unmanned station with just a little automated gate that one could walk around. The gate could process tickets or IC cards to denote that this was the station that the passenger boarded the train from, so that they could pay the appropriate amount when getting off, but the JR Pass didn’t exactly need any processing. There wasn’t even a way to insert the card when exiting the station through that gate, only boarding.

I went to book my tickets at Okayama Station, and found that the earliest train that was covered by the JR Pass would involve a transfer at Shin-Kobe Station, and would dump me off at Kyoto Station at 11:02 am, a little after our agreed upon meeting time at 10:45. That was apparently okay though, as they were arriving in Kyoto Station with luggage in tow and needed some time to find lockers to put their suitcases in.

I didn’t take any pictures of the trip there, nor did I buy a bento to eat on the way, since I was literally going to Kyoto to have lunch. I did, however, bring along my laptop, and my power brick, though this time I used my backpack instead of my shoulder sling bag so that I would be able to store the entire laptop in it. This was the one and only outing on my vacation where I used my backpack instead of my sling bag. And this time, I knew to book window seats on both trains on the way there.

Once I reached Kyoto Station, I texted Xuanjie, who said he was waiting outside a store named The Cube out the center/western shinkansen gates of the station. I went to that store and looked around — nothing. Puzzled, I went back to wait by the shinkansen gates, he came over to pick me up, and on the way back to where his girlfriend was waiting, we found out that there were two different branches of that The Cube store less than a minute’s walk away from each other. How weird! We had a good laugh over that.

I was delighted to see Xuanjie again and I assumed the feeling was mutual. We chatted a bit as we walked back to where his girlfriend was, and I was introduced to her — she was Sara (I think, unsure if there’s a H on the end..), and I would learn over lunch that Xuanjie was in the gaming industry and Sara was trying to break into it. Sara was here because her current company had sent her here for a temporary posting, and Xuanjie had come to meet her for a short week-long vacation and then go back to Singapore together after that.

We couldn’t find a restaurant in the attached mall to eat at that didn’t look like it was going to take prohibitively long for us to get in due to queues, since Xuanjie and Sara were on a timer to get onto their train, so we ended up walking out of the malls and crossing a road to a little ramen bar called Jiro Ramen to eat at instead. I was able to more or less translate the entire menu, which did make me happy. I ate the one thing I couldn’t fully translate — the top item on the right row, which turned out to be a Chicken Nanban Set Meal or something. I realized later after comparing daily spending logs and photo analysis that the meal had cost 950 yen, but I only paid 900 yen back to Xuanjie, who footed the total bill for us. Or rather, I gave him 1000 yen but he gave me back 100 yen instead of 50 yen, so now I owe him 50 cents. Phooey.

We had a nice, long chat over lunch, although it was not nearly long enough to ask all the things I wanted to ask after two decades. I did, at some point, ask about this astronomy camp incident though, and Xuanjie did confirm that he dimly remembered the event, but not much more about it, nor who the third person was. He wasn’t even sure if it was his house at first, but eventually came to the conclusion that it probably was. I had apparently already also come to the same conclusion on my blog, but I had actually forgotten what that conclusion was while in-person with him, so I’m glad that our thoughts on that matter lined up in the end.

Sara was surprised that we were classmates from that long ago, and surprised that we were the same age in general, since she said I looked a lot younger than Xuanjie did. Hehe! That was probably only due to me dying my hair black to hide the multitude of white strands though. Also, Xuanjie now wore glasses — that was a surprise to me, because he always had perfect eyesight when I knew him. Conversely, it was a surprise to Sara that he didn’t used to wear them, since she only knew him from a time period long after he had already started wearing them. I think it was said that they had known each other for about 5 years, whereas Xuanjie found his eyesight deteoriating in Pre-U or something like that. Definitely after I left and before he was enlisted to join the army.

After lunch, we went out so Sara could deposit a postcard to the mailbox in the local Japan Post building, and then we took a picture with what we assume was the post office’s mascot, on top of a mailbox outside the store.

Tigey had his day in the sun there, too. He met (and touched) both Sara and Xuanjie.

After that, they both had to leave to catch their shinkansen to Tokyo, and I abused my JR Pass, which allowed me free entry into the shinkansen paid area, and followed them all the way onto the train platform, and saw them off as they entered the train. How very anime. Though it’s an interesting sidenote on how characters in anime do it — they aren’t allowed to get the JR Pass, and thus don’t have a free way of getting past the paid gates when running after their childhood friend/long lost love/sensei/crush/whoever that’s leaving on the bullet train to meet them on the platform just before the bullet train leaves, as far as I know. Maybe they can use an IC card, and then explain it to the station staff afterwards to get out of the paid area for free, but I’m not sure. (One usually cannot tap out of the same station after using an iC card without staff intervention — it is possible with the JR Pass though).

I noticed that because they didn’t have JR Passes, they went for one of the faster train that the JR Pass didn’t cover, the Nozomi train. They even went for the slightly more expensive Green Car option. They might not have had a choice, since they specifically needed two adjacent back row seats for those with oversized luggage, of which there were only five per train carriage, although the slower trains usually had plenty of spots this time of year.

Anyway, once I saw them off, I went out and bought my own ticket home, then bought a small bento and eyed this vending machine.

I needed to take a picture so that I could figure out what it was much later on — it apparently was yatsuhashi, some sort of local confection souvenir. I didn’t buy it.

My bento box was a 2022 Unagi Sobaro Bento or something like that, and looked like this:

Overpriced at 1299 yen, but with lots of meat (and apparently rice underneath the meat too), and the noodles looked real good. I snacked on that in stages on my direct train to Okayama, because I was uncertain about dinner plans that night.

So many empty seats from Kyoto to Osaka to Okayama.