June 23 - Wednesday (Happy Birthday, Ole!)

Betsy and I left our curtains open and the sun was shining brightly before 5:30. Ginger had
found a western toilet the night before and boy is that a good thing! Betsy and I stretch and
dress and are in the dining room before our 7:00 breakfast time. Norito already has our food
prepared and sets our places even before I have a chance to begin blogging. I did manage to get
yesterday's photos downloaded, so that's something.

Breakfast is as unbelievable as dinner had been! Scrambled eggs and sausage, fried potatoes with bacon, fish paste, tofu, tart cherry, grapefruit, spinach with sesame, coffee and tea!

I've really been dreading going back across the snow, especially since it is now raining, and Nick asks if we could pay a couple of the boys to take our bags for us. (There is a staff of about a dozen who are preparing for the tourist season.) Norito says that the boys will certainly help us with our bags, but they refuse to accept any payment. Since it is now raining and turning the snow to slush, hearing her response is one of the high points of the trip!

We quickly return to our rooms, gather our bags and meet at the front to remove our indoor
slippers and don our rain gear. The boys have large umbrellas for us that we gratefully accept
and they take our bags our into the elements. It sure is a good thing we took our walk and photos last night! Visibility is zilch today! As I contemplate the walk back, we see that the bags are being loaded into something like a snowcat with caterpillar treads! Now we don't feel so bad about asking for help! And we ask if we can ride, too!

It's a stretch up into the back of the vehicle but long-legged Ginger has no trouble! Betsy seems to make is easily, too, but the shortie in the group has to ask Nick for a boost! The ride is like being on an amusement park roller coaster! Ups and downs and bumps that threaten to knock me off the side rail where I'm sitting, into the snow! It's really fun - in retrospect! We get door-to-door service and the boys deposit our luggage inside the doorway to the station! What a lovely ending to this part of our adventure! And now to come back down.

The next several hours are a blur - on and off regular buses, trolley buses, cable cars, and I don't know what all! We are descending back down from our highest point of about 8200 feet! We can feel our ears popping and my water bottle is quite deformed! On one of the conveyances I
find myself sitting with a Japanese couple. They have been on a three-day excursion up into the
mountains from Osaka and are happy to chat in English, with a lot of smiling to fill in the blanks.

About half way down we stop at Kurobe Dam and walk across to the other side, taking pictures as we go. Although it is drizzling a bit, the resultant view is perhaps more perfect for it. There is a mist hannging over the mountains and every thing is a soft pastel. It looks more "Japanese" than it would in bright sunshine! There is a lot of wood that has accumulated against the face of the dam and we watch the workers clearing it away. It is a labor-intensive operation involving lowering a large flat sieve into the water at an angle and tipping it up to catch the wood, then pulling it back to the top of the dam. There are men in boats who help to load it, but they are careful not to be underneath, since inevitably some of the wood slips through the holes!

Our last leg is by bus and what a bus it is! There are chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and a flower-filled vase on the wall behind the driver! We are deposted at the train station and are on our way to Tokyo.

Ginger is the first to spot Mt. Fuji! We snap away, hoping for a shot without power lines. It's a good thing we didn't wait for it, because the clouds move in to shroud the mountain.

We arrive at Tokyo's central station and it is truly amazingly huge! People rushing everywhere,
tracks on several different levels, stairs and escalators going up and down at every turn! I'm glad there are four of us to figure out what's going on. Just finding an exit is quite a challenge! We're looking for the Metropolitan Hotel but it turns out there are several of them in the city, each adjacent to a train station.

Nick is so good about asking for directions! Because of that we finally locate the building, but the entrance is elusive! The hotel has a separate entrance from the rest of the building which houses offices on the first twenty-six floors. After some discussion at the reception desk the staff determines that our reservations are at a different location and one of them whisks us downstairs (and out of sight!) into a cab that will carry us onward.

Our hotel, too, is right by an entrance to the train station, and it is as opulent as the first one. We check in without incident and a bellhop takes our luggage up to our rooms. Our room faces east, so we have a built in alarm clock. Ginger and Nick's faces west and Ginger comes to get us so we can see the sunset.

Now that we are settled in for a few days we can relax a little and go off in our never-ending
search for food! We're such hunter-gatherers! There is another huge department store connected to the station and we find several restaurants, finally settling on a Chinese one. Everyone orders by picture and gets something different. Somehow, after all the delicious Japanese food, this is good but not as exciting as it might have been at home! Of course, since I don't know the kangi for Szeuschan, my opinion might be a bit colored by the stinging of my lips!

Some photos of the lights on the street and homeward we go. So many of the buildings' displays
run vertically along the fronts of the stores and all seem to light up at night! Others occupy the entire side of their buildings!