The south: first stop Nagoya

At 20:00h we met our friend in the train station of Tsukuba. From there there is only one possible direction: TOKYO, so there we went. When we arrived we discussed: and now what? We decided to go around Kobe to the house of the family of one of our colleagues. The only train which was going in this direction was to the city of Nagoya... so we went to Nagoya. At 21.30h we left to the south by shinkansen (bullet train).

Suddenly, around the region of the Mount Fuji the train stopped. The loudspeakers of the train started to make announcements in Japanese (luckily, our friend Nobu was with us, if not no way): a strong earthquake had occur in Shizuoka prefecture (the region to the south of Fuji including the peninsula). While we were stopped there, we contacted our friend in Kobe. He told us that the origin of this earthquake was different than the one which caused the big one in Tohoku and the tsunamis, and that the epicentre was around the volcano Fuji. Then we started to laugh thinking on the news of the next days saying: Due to a strong earthquake in Shizuoka, Fuji has erupted and the lava swept a shinkansen full of Japanese, a German guy and a Spanish girl who were escaping of the radioactivity. It was too sad!!

After a long stop, the train started again to move but this time really slowly: they had to check the track before we could continue. This made us arrive with three hours of delay, UFFFF! There were a couple of things that surprised me of how things occur. First, that the train could brake or reduce its velocity using a very good earthquake warning system avoiding an accident. And second, the civic behaviour of the Japanese. In the train there was no panic and everybody was calm, they only attacked the drinks machine and went to buy food to the bar. They did not complain about the delay and nobody lost his temper, it is clear that the train company was not guilty but you know how people react sometimes... And last but not least, they gave us back part of the money we paid (the ticket was expensive), because with the delay the train was not anymore express! My experience in Germany in this respect is not so good, they have very often delay without any apparent reason and do not say even thank you for paying the fast train and arrive as late as with the slow one. I liked the honesty they showed.

At the end, we arrived to Nagoya very late and we decided that it was not worth anymore to go to a hotel. Then, were we go? In Japan, there are some kind of hybrids between cybercafe, comic libraries and freakyland, they are called manga or internet cafes. There, for a low price one can be in some kind of cyber with comfortable computer chairs where one can read mangas, connect to internet, play games in line and even watch films (mainly manga animes). There are some drinks included and easy access to others and to food. They also have small individual rooms that at that night were all occupied, toilets and even showers. So, in one of this places we finished, among Japanese freaks, reading news, chatting with Europe and having short naps in from of a computer.

We stayed in the manga cafe until the day arrived. Then, we went to visit the city trying to forget why we were there...