here, there, everywhere

A quick digression on trains: as we are both trying to save money out here, figuring out what to do with our brief time off was a bit difficult, because traveling in Japan is - to my mind, anyhow - prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, one way around the stratospheric transportation prices is the "18 kippu," which is issued three times a year by Japan Railway. Basically, for about $115, you get five days (whenever you want) of unlimited travel on all local JR trains. When you consider that a one way trip to Tokyo from Numazu on the local averages about $25 already, this can be a great deal. Unfortunately, as we both found out, the word "unlimited" is far less important than the word "local." Japan may not look like a big country and we were only going two prefectures away, but getting to Gujo Hachiman from Numazu, for example, took us eight hours and six transfers. Bewilderingly, it took us even longer to come back from a city that was geographically closer (we also had a lot of difficulty just planning the routes; there are perhaps unsurprisingly few resources in English and more surprisingly few physical maps of the routes). This was very fun and exciting for the first day (so much time to read!); by the third, I was dangerously close to becoming consumed with a simmering hatred for myself for thinking this would be a good idea, my backpack for being so unreasonably heavy, train station convenient store food, and the JR system in general. 

Fortunately, I didn't have time to dwell on that when we were actually in town - as I mentioned before, Gujo Hachiman was really beautiful, with lots of old buildings and narrow streets.