Wednesday, July 20th 2016, 07:50 am
There was a slight earthquake with the intensity of 3 or 4 in the morning. Oh well… yes! We are in Japan and there’re up to 5 earthquakes per day throughout Japan, but still… I haven’t ever experienced such shaky ground. I woke up and thought a train is rushing by, but a train would have been through in like 3 seconds, right? Good thing, we sleep on a Japanese style futon, which is pretty much like sleeping on the ground.
Today, we’ve been floating through the city, which brings me to quote Tucholsky again:
Entspanne dich. Lass das Steuer los, trudele durch die Welt. Sie ist so schön: Gib dich ihr hin, und sie wird sich dir geben.
Kurt Tucholsky, Die Kunst, richtig zu reisen
10:00 am
And that’s what we’ve done today: We just went out riding the Yamanote line, which is a JR (Japanese Rail) line and pleases all the travelers holding a Japanese Rail Pass, and dropped off whenever we wanted to. NO MAP, NO SCHEDULE, NO ITINERARY, we just followed our intuition and were trying to get a feeling for the places we’ve been landed to.
Tokyo inhabits around 10,000 000 people. Another 35,000 000 live in the greater Tokyo area. CRAZY! I cannot even grasp these numbers, but when we’ve been to an oberservation deck this evening, I could barely imagine how many people must be living here. I mean, Tokyo is a growing city, multi-level railroad tracks had been built between tall skyscrapers, one junction is connected by 4 to 5 cross-walks, the traffic also covers cars, motorcycles, busses, bikes and trespassers. The infrastracture works without any delays and helps keeping the metro, the shinkansen and super fast trains as well as the subway running.
Rivers and Roads 