262. The best/fastest trains are the famous Shinkansen, or bullet trains. I have to say, seeing giant Shinkansen signage leading to my first trip was THRILLING.pic.twitter.com/jrB3OeFF5O
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272. In a weird reversal of pretty much all of my life, this train restroom was much better than most stationary ones. (Flushing without touching! And something I nicknamed “ButtOn.”)pic.twitter.com/s2FRxG10dh
273. Some Shinkansen even accommodated two… flavours of doing… things.pic.twitter.com/too5CfaUeW
274. I also went to see the Kyoto railway museum, which was really awesome. Some of its interior design (look above) even resembled a train.pic.twitter.com/Gv7h9WA0OU
275. A few amazing moments in that museum. First: Sitting in the cabin of the original 1960s Shinkansen train.pic.twitter.com/s4sIJuX3lQ
276. Second: They had a powered train where you could press the actual buttons to get the pantograph up and down!pic.twitter.com/KBbPl1XLrJ
…which was sort of a dream of mine. (My grandpa worked at the railways.)pic.twitter.com/GOnFTpQolz
277. Third: I also touched the very wire that pantographs grab to get electricity! (And survived to tell my story.)pic.twitter.com/907P9paQOa
278. Fourth: This really cool, heavy, and loud button with massive springs inside went up and down and opened/closeed the train doors.pic.twitter.com/wfsBhfVxW0
279. Fifth: You can ride on the rail bike! If you’re over 120cm tall. Which I am! BTW this is not a photo of me. :·)pic.twitter.com/LXz6MSOFjV
280. Sixth: I ate some ice cream in this 1958 dining car, now moored and converted into a restaurant.pic.twitter.com/rsCByPRRk2
281. Also! Also!!! They had an actual split-flap display with the original control panel. You have NO IDEA how excited this made me.pic.twitter.com/fqXWwHJ3U2
I spent so much time with it and figured all of it out (incl. some of its bugs) – at the end I was giving the Japanese people tips. That was really awesome. I really want to have one now.pic.twitter.com/llD1uLPt33
282. I saw these beautiful diagonal line train schedules at a museum (incl. a plotter that drew them!) and I assumed they were obsolete/vintage… but then I saw them in actual use on a commuter train!pic.twitter.com/4wcfW9maNP
283. This was a cool idea: putting a little camera atop a model train, and allowing kids to ride them, the view making model trains feel more like real trains.pic.twitter.com/dAL6kZgFMM
284. Stepping outside the museum… The first class is called Green Car here. What it is depends on the train, it seems. In this one, the Green Car was the front car: it had huge seats with a lot of legroom, and a great panoramic view.pic.twitter.com/fEOE3mJOYD
285. In this other train, Green Car was this system where after loading a Green Car ticket onto your transit card, you could just tap above to indicate you’re taking a seat. (It remembered your other choice, so if you swapped seats, it would un-flip your last one automatically!)pic.twitter.com/la4vco579A
286. I also had this fun moment when, enthralled with the views outside of the train window, I realized I wasn’t the only one.pic.twitter.com/AeMrkbhgSI
287. “Marcin, enough waxing poetically about trains. Show me more of those trash cans that look like robots.”pic.twitter.com/5Uy4DUnixh
288. How about this brick that inexplicably looked like a Face ID icon?pic.twitter.com/fG20HWpYWC
289. In this cool music store, I found a music keyboard that used 14-segment displays! Those were popular on pinball machines, but it was exciting to see them used elsewhere.pic.twitter.com/S9f7AUPoUl
290. (One vending machine also introduced me to this variant of a 7-segment display I haven’t seen before.)pic.twitter.com/tNA5lUrmd1
291. In another mall, after feeling overwhelmed, I sat down to one of the digital pianos, and simply started playing that one Bear McCreary’s sonata I know how to play. No one stopped me.pic.twitter.com/GoRJ1fyrOC
(If you’re interested, I wrote about this sonata a few years ago: https://medium.com/@mwichary/1-110-notes-9972f7779263 ….)
292. This happened more often, different flavours of being lost: in a bookstore where I couldn’t identify one single section; in a giant Shibuya train station, half under construction; in a heavy rush hour traffic where at times I felt I had little control over where I was going.
But at no point I felt unsafe, and those experiences I learned to treasure. Japan seemed like a perfect place to be lost before I went there; now I know it for sure.
(My internal compass is not great, but somehow in Japan I ended up going in the opposite direction than I intended even more often than usual.)pic.twitter.com/eHKZ0x4tci
We’re about to bring this threat to its end. It’s actually funny how it all started, completely unplanned, with this little exchange with my friend @wynlim. The list ended up much longer than I ever expected.pic.twitter.com/XZybBOkWnl
(And if you care, there’s a parallel keyboard-only Japan thread that is still going on… https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/958969046476636160 …)
You probably noticed a lot of patterns. Here’s another one. A lot of my discovery of Japan followed this routine: 1. Discover something amazing. 2. Realize this amazing thing is EVERYWHERE, a baseline. 3. Discover an even more extraordinary version of that thing, in some places.
One thing I didn’t mention much yet that follows that pattern was *people.* Everyone I met in Japan was very polite. But some of those people were incredibly kind.
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