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Age of Steam! ...well, not exactly
Shinsuke invited me to come with him today to go see a real steam engine down in Chiba. I had thought we'd get to ride it, but it turned out that no, today was a test run and the real run is over the weekend, but all the tickets are sold out, so we'd just get to see it. Doh! Anyway, this is an old steam locomotive that apparently hadn't run in this particular area for like 37 years or something like that. Pretty neat. It's not every day you get to see a steam locomotive running through the suburbs of Tokyo.
I met up with Shin at Chiba-Minato station, which is where it was starting from, and it was pretty crowded, with tons of other train nerds with big cameras! Hee. It wasn't too hard to find each other, and then we just walked around looking at the train for half an hour, and marvelling at the crowds. I elbowed us into a good vantage point for the actual takeoff, so we got to see that.
Shin managed to get me to a decent vantage point to take a picture from the front of the train, but the train was majorly backlit so most of the shots from this angle ended up not coming out well. Oops. But look at the CROWD!
Watching the train leave. Holy smoke!
We hopped on a real train to Soga and followed the steam train there, but that was kind of boring, so we decided to go back towards Tokyo after that. I tried to convince Shin we should ride the Chiba Monorail, but apparently being a train geek doesn't extend to monorails for him. WTF?
Anyway, rather than swapping trains at Kinshicho, we got out there and found lunch. Or more like, we went to a place called Tsubame Grill which Shin had wanted to try out. I guess you could say the food was vaguely European. The restaurant itself, though, Shin had me guess the name's source, and I was like "Well, Tsubame is 'swallow' like the bird... does it have anything to do with the Kokutetsu Swallows?" I said it as a joke, but actually, it turns out that the restaurant is named after the Kokutetsu Tsubame train which went from Tokyo to Kobe in the 1940's... and the team ended up vaguely being named after it too.
"You realize, of course, that all of the random Japan knowledge I have all comes from baseball, right?" I said.
"Yeah, you're really different from most geeks. Their random Japan knowledge all comes from anime."
The food was good, and then we went to Jimbocho so I could get some back issues of Shukan Baseball and Pro Yakyu Ai (shut up). As it turns out, at Shosen Bookmart, the baseball magazines are right next to the bicycle magazines, so we both had something to read. That was good.
Then, amidst dark stormy clouds that never actually opened up on us, we walked to Akihabara, and walked around a bit, and got bored, and Shin decided to go home because he had to do laundry and I guess I'm boring. Or something.
I guess I had some stuff to take care of too -- I went to Ito Yokado and bought more laundry detergent and fabric softener. I got some Downy! But I couldn't get a foreign detergent. Thinking of bringing some back with me next trip, because I'm sick of Japanese detergents leaving little white specks all over my clothes and not really cleaning them very well. I also went to the foodmart and bought some food, including an 18-pc pack of tekka maki. I like how in Japan I don't fear buying supermarket sushi (and infact when I ate it later that night it was quite decent). I also got taiyaki -- two of them -- I ate one when I got home and was still warm, and the other one I'm leaving until tomorrow. If it's still decent then, I can buy some from this place to bring to the US for Carl.
I wasted the evening on PP. Oops. Should stop doing that. Tomorrow I'm going to Shinagawa though... and I mean, I did write another job app tonight so it's not like I totally shot the evening. But I probably should be accomplishing more with my time.
Anyway, trains. Yeah.
I met up with Shin at Chiba-Minato station, which is where it was starting from, and it was pretty crowded, with tons of other train nerds with big cameras! Hee. It wasn't too hard to find each other, and then we just walked around looking at the train for half an hour, and marvelling at the crowds. I elbowed us into a good vantage point for the actual takeoff, so we got to see that.
Shin managed to get me to a decent vantage point to take a picture from the front of the train, but the train was majorly backlit so most of the shots from this angle ended up not coming out well. Oops. But look at the CROWD!
Watching the train leave. Holy smoke!
We hopped on a real train to Soga and followed the steam train there, but that was kind of boring, so we decided to go back towards Tokyo after that. I tried to convince Shin we should ride the Chiba Monorail, but apparently being a train geek doesn't extend to monorails for him. WTF?
Anyway, rather than swapping trains at Kinshicho, we got out there and found lunch. Or more like, we went to a place called Tsubame Grill which Shin had wanted to try out. I guess you could say the food was vaguely European. The restaurant itself, though, Shin had me guess the name's source, and I was like "Well, Tsubame is 'swallow' like the bird... does it have anything to do with the Kokutetsu Swallows?" I said it as a joke, but actually, it turns out that the restaurant is named after the Kokutetsu Tsubame train which went from Tokyo to Kobe in the 1940's... and the team ended up vaguely being named after it too.
"You realize, of course, that all of the random Japan knowledge I have all comes from baseball, right?" I said.
"Yeah, you're really different from most geeks. Their random Japan knowledge all comes from anime."
The food was good, and then we went to Jimbocho so I could get some back issues of Shukan Baseball and Pro Yakyu Ai (shut up). As it turns out, at Shosen Bookmart, the baseball magazines are right next to the bicycle magazines, so we both had something to read. That was good.
Then, amidst dark stormy clouds that never actually opened up on us, we walked to Akihabara, and walked around a bit, and got bored, and Shin decided to go home because he had to do laundry and I guess I'm boring. Or something.
I guess I had some stuff to take care of too -- I went to Ito Yokado and bought more laundry detergent and fabric softener. I got some Downy! But I couldn't get a foreign detergent. Thinking of bringing some back with me next trip, because I'm sick of Japanese detergents leaving little white specks all over my clothes and not really cleaning them very well. I also went to the foodmart and bought some food, including an 18-pc pack of tekka maki. I like how in Japan I don't fear buying supermarket sushi (and infact when I ate it later that night it was quite decent). I also got taiyaki -- two of them -- I ate one when I got home and was still warm, and the other one I'm leaving until tomorrow. If it's still decent then, I can buy some from this place to bring to the US for Carl.
I wasted the evening on PP. Oops. Should stop doing that. Tomorrow I'm going to Shinagawa though... and I mean, I did write another job app tonight so it's not like I totally shot the evening. But I probably should be accomplishing more with my time.
Anyway, trains. Yeah.
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Was this thing wood- or coal-fired?
Also if you're tired of Japanese powdered detergents you ought to get the liquid version of the same brand. They work pretty well.
Also, my random Japan knowledge comes from... overdetailed history books?
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This was a coal train. I should post a shot of the gigantic coal box behind the front. Scary.
Yeah, it was crowded, lots of people, we couldn't get that close -- that top shot, I was on the opposite platform and had basically edged into a crowd for about 6 seconds of snapping.
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O_O
Very weakly relatedly, a brand new steam train recently rode 200 miles down from Darlington (10 miles west of here) to London, apparently the first new steam train in this country for close to sixty years or somesuch. It's a steam renaissance...
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