Niigata

My kingdom for a US keyboard. I'm at Niigata train terminal at the moment, making use of the 30 minutes of free internet access they have here. However, I've blown a good 5 minutes of that time searching for the @ (located where the [ symbol normally is) and the ' (which is shift-7). The space bar is about as wide as the backspace key normally is, and my space thumb is routinely stricking a special 'input type' that changes me from English to Japanese input :S

So this is going to be a short post...

Travelling Japan by train is a wonderful experience. There is an abundance of beautiful country and snow-topped mountains to witness. If one has the patience to spend 2-6 hours on a train, I highly recommend it.

I arrived in Niigata yesterday around lunch time, and proceeded to take a figure-eight walk through the town. I had originally planned for this to just be a square-shaped walk, but my map was quite unhelpful and I ended up walking through pretty much the entire town. Niigata is a beautiful coastal town home to some 500,000 residents, so the walk only took about 4 hours at a leisurely pace. I don't think they get very many tourists around here though. I've seen all of 4 westerners in the time I've been here and English is a hard language to get by on. But that's been really good for me. I can already feel my Japanese skills increasing exponentially, not because I'm learning anything new but just because I am becoming more confident with what I've already learnt.

The lack of tourism in this area however results in me feeling very watched. Without exaggeration, about 70% of the people I walk pass on the street will look at me, and a fair number of those will blatantly stare. However, nobody has made me feel unwelcome. A Japanese friend of mine who lives toward the south thinks it's got a lot to do with height, and I'd believe that. Most places that did not have a western construction (for example, traditional Japanese restaurants, not modern hotels) I will have to duck to walk around in.

When I return to Japan from London I plan to spend 3-6 months simply studying the language, and nothing else. I feel that Niigata would be a wonderful place to focus purely on learning the language before moving somewhere larger to find work.

Today I'll be boarding a (normal) train up the west cost through the even smaller town of Akita and eventually arrive into Aomori 5 hours later, where I'll stay for the night. After that, I'll travel up to Sapporo (mmm... beer) over 6 hours.

I should hopefully be able to update when I get to Sapporo, but I'll be looking for somewhere with a US keyboard :P