Let’s take a quick trip

Let’s take a quick trip together, shall we?

How’s about we go to Kobe Japan?  Due to the miracle of the internet, ha!  we’re already there.  Let’s go to the train station; we can go anywhere in Japan from there.

This is the north side of Kobe Station, in the Sannomiya shopping district, and from here, in the old days (mid 80’s) we could have seen the first place I worked at teaching English, Sanmihall, an English coffee shop.  I was a "Conversation Coordinator" there, starting and keeping going conversations in English so that my Japanese clients could use their language skills.

Use it or lose it, you know.

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Here’s the south side of the station.  The harbour is down this way, and in it, is Port Island, an artificial island in Osaka bay on which the warehouse that was the home of my last job in Japan stands.  I was the car pool driver for the company, driving a very nice Camry (in Japan, a "Septre") wagon from my home to Kobe station and picking up six or seven of the employees and driving us all down to Port Island and the comapny that we worked for.

I had a Japanese Driver’s License, you know, and drove pretty well there, even if it was on the other side of the road from here.  I think it said a lot about what my company thought about me, to take me on, first off, the only foreign employee they had, and second, to give me a really nice car to drive.

When I interviewed for the bus driving job, I told them "if I can do it in Japan, I can do it here too."  Voila, I have a job driving people back and forth now here too, although my bus is no where near as "nice" as that wagon was!

This is one of the Platform areas in Kobe Station; the large JR is for "Japan Railways", the semi-private company whose trains run all over Japan.

JR also runs the Shinkansen, the Bullet Train, whose station is a few miles north of here.  I’ve riden the Shinkansen a few times; there’s just something so cool about sitting on a train going 178 kilos an hour and popping a beer (they come around selling them) and watching the countryside race by.

These three pics are totally recent; K* sent them to me in an email this morning, from her camera phone.

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Why the US still doesn’t have High Speed Rail is beyond me; I mean, at one time, the US was railroad capital of the world.  Our congressmen and senators have obviously been bought off by the airlines; every year for the past decade, Amtrak, the semi-private company that runs our passenger rail system has been throttled; choked for lack of investment.  It’s a fucking shame, is what it is.  President shrub wants to cut them even more, yet another example of how stupidly dim-witted the man is.

("man" is used very loosely here)

Probably owns lots of stock in the airline industry.

We do indeed have the best government that money can buy; these corporations and their dimwit investors look only to the next quarter, not the long run. 

Idiots.  Criminally stupid idiots.

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