My Shinkansen Front the Most

An Internet cafe in Kyoto, Japan
Special Guest Blogger - Juan N.

We devoted yesterday to the Aichi World Expo. Man, I wish we would've planned that better. We didn't end up with a whole bunch of time to explore what a world expo has to offer. As soon as I spotted the Gas Pavilion I got waaay too excited and blew over an hour waiting for the wonders of natural gas, which turned out to be a lame-ass magic show. With some fire. Arrgh.

The Maglev exhibit was much much much cooler though. That was a 3D movie built from test footage of the world's fastest maglev train. Man, all of a sudden the Shinkansen seem so passe. Not to mention the Gold Line in Pasadena. I will not rest satisfied until my car rests of a cushion of air. Or magnetic field lines, as the case may be.

I met up with Jason and Mike (they weren't as excited about the highly entropic state of matter as I was) later, and we had ourselves some Mexican food in said country's pavilion. The Japanese approximation of tacos de pollo was not a very good one. I wanted to check out the Robot Station, later decided on the Toyota exhibit, and finally realized I didn't have enough time before we booked it for Kyoto.

I did, however, walk away with plenty of Merch merch. Gotta help the ol' Japanese economy.

We were short on time and were presented with a slight conundrum. We could take the earlier Shinkansen that stopped at every stop, or wait for the direct route that left 20 minutes later. Mike suggested we turn it into an experiment, so I grabbed his phone, and jumped in the early Kodama Shinkansen.

And look at that. My train beat theirs by a whole 5 minutes. I met them with a giant grin on my face. Man, my Shinkansen front the most!

With no time to spare, we made it to our Kyoto no ryokan. Showered, and had a good night's rest.

We woke up for the free continental breakfast and met a nice couple. The girl, Taryn (sp?) reminded me a whole lot of you, Jackie.

We checked out of the ryokan and walked ourselves to the Internet cafe I am writing this entry in.