Thank You and OK! There's a famous train here, the Shinkansen, often called the "Bullet Train" in English though it literally means "New Trunk Line" I see elephants for cars.
I much prefer the names of Hikari light ray , for the super express which doesn't make so many stops, and Kodama echo , which stops at every Shinkansen station.
To me, riding the Shinkansen is like being in a plane that's taking off, only a little bit cheaper. It's often crowded and I like to pay a few hundred extra yen to get a reserved seat by a window so I can gaze at the tile roofs and rice paddies flying by or catch a row of old farmhouses, their weathered wood and mud walls in a blur.
Sometimes I study the minutia and sometimes I just groove - other times I read a book or doze off. Shimizu from the Monday Morning Class complains it rolls a little from side to side but it seems pretty smooth to me as it shoots along on elevated tracks safely above all kids, animals and cars.
Its massive two story reinforced cement structure starts from the South in Fukuoka in the northern extremity of Kyushu and runs to Morioka in northern Honshu , with some significant branch tracks out of Tokyo. All in all, there are over miles of track in the sky for the Echoes and Light Rays. It is Japan's Great Wall. A pamphlet from the station proudly states that since it was built in there hasn't been a single fatal accident, and indeed, I feel close to immortal when I'm lucky enough to be a Shinkansen passenger hurtling somewhere through the day or night.
