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Goal today was to work out exactly where we are, and what is around. And more import­antly, how we are get­ting around.

Pic­ture: Can Has 8-bit Text! Shinkansen timetable

First stop: JR sta­tion to pur­chase tick­ets. Even­tu­ally lin­ing up in the cor­rect queue, we spent about AU$1200 on cari­ous Shinkansen (bullet/fast train) both to Hiroshima for Sunday, and going into Tokyo for Tues­day next week. Kyoto is a short 30 minute train ride north-ish tomorrow.

Yodo­bashi Cam­era. My nemesis on pre­vi­ous trips; this trip is no dif­fer­ent. Pur­chased a new Canon IXY 1000 10 mega­pixel cam­era and handed the old Canon down. This will be my 4^th IXY cam­era, and they are real workhorses.

Now Yodo­bashi cam­era. Think of a depart­ment store, but with elec­tron­ics galore. Every brand, soft­ware, hard­ware, whit­e­goods, obscure accessor­ies: the list goes on. In a ver­tical store 7 stor­ies high. Now non-geeks, before your brain explodsed, there is are two floors of fash­ion and another 2 floors of food.

Pic­ture: many, many isles of geek gad­getry. There are 6 floors above this full of geek stuff.

Osaka is miss­ing the vend­ing machines of Tokyo. In Tokyo, they exist every­where. In Osaka, the only vend­ing machines are for cigarettes.

TV is Japan is as weird as por­trayed on Aus­tralia TV. Con­sid­er­ing the range, and HD qual­ity of TV’s as demon­strated in Yodo­bashi, I won­der what Japan­ese people watch.

Not happy just to watch TV at home, there are now phones that have TV and all the other phone stuff. The TV isn’t beamed over the net­work: there is a little antenna:

Liam wit­nessed some anim­ated under­pants at 2pm, and the morn­ing show has its own Karl. Happy whales in cata­logs, and less Eng­lish signs than you find in Tokyo.