Bullet Train 新幹線

Traveling from Okayama to Mito (my new home) was a 6 hour trip by bullet train (shin-kan-sen) which reaches speeds of 200 miles per hour. The train is so fast that you have to look at objects in the distance in order to not get a headache.  The total distance was approximately 500 miles. 

In the spirit of flying past objects, this post will be snapshots and short captions of my trip. 

Japan's landscape is mountainous, but very different from the mountains of the United States. To steal an image, it is like someone cut the tops off of mountains and placed them on flat ground. Instead of continual slopes, there are mountains with perfectly flat spaces in between. 

Because there were so many mountains, there were also a lot of tunnels for the train to travel through. Effectively that meant that every time there was a picture-worthy scene, I had just enough time to take out my camera - but not enough time to take the photo - before we entered another tunnel and it was gone.

As we traveled further north, we saw more snow on the peaks.

What surprised my most about the overall layout of Japan was the close proximity of rural and urban structures. Fields next to multi-story buildings was not an odd sight.

It looks like clouds, but this is actually Mt. Fuji.

It's top pops out above the cloud cover.

And then I arrived. 

And I will have go on another adventure so that I can tell you about it!