This is my lunch on the train yesterday but I'll come back to that.

The first thrill of this holiday was to come out of the flat and walk a couple of hundred yards up Leith Walk and jump (well step) onto a tram to the airport.  In the departure lounge I bumped into Phil Barnes (Venetian Twins director) who was riding shotgun to Amman with his daughter.  She's doing Arabic at St Andrews and was off to Jordan as part of her course.  Phil was combining seeing his daughter safely there (my surmise) with a wee holiday.  I thought we might meet again in Heathrow but we didn't.

The flight to Tokyo was interminable and sleepless so no interest there.  Haneda airport was not the teeming mass of mayhem that it was the last time but had its moments.  Although the passport control booths are still equipped with cameras and fingerprint machines a separate line of machines manned by un-uniformed personnel has been set up before passport control.  Whether this is job creation or a demarcation dispute I know not.

My heart sank a little when after fiddling about with my passport and disembarkation form for a while the immigration officer left her booth and led me to another officer waving said passport and declaring "trouble" .  Is this Miami all over again?

The trouble turned out to be of a computer nature, nothing to do with me guv, and it took a visit to three booths to get me through but I made it.

Next stop the Japan Rail desk to exchange my 21 day rail pass voucher into an actual rail pass. That was straightforward and the lady booked me a seat to Akita for the following day.  But the pass start date I needed was the 7th not the 6th so I had to buy a ticket to get me into town.

But first I helped an American couple cope with the difficulty Japanese have with the pronunciations of "r" and "l".  As he rightly remarked, wearing a mask doesn't help.  Officials pretty much all seem to still be wearing masks though a smaller but still high fraction of the general public are doing so.

Then the ticket machine.  I correctly identified the sort of ticket I needed for the two stage journey to Kanda and a screen popped up asking me to choose a ticket value. I'd forgotten that within the greater Tokyo area and I think more or less everywhere else you need to find your destination station on a vast map above the ticket machines where it tells you the cost of getting there.  No zoning system and although there are other ways of doing this with stored value cards the world shortage of chip materials has introduced a problem that I can't be bothered to explain and I wanted to use cash.  Anyway some helpful officials were hanging about to ease the foreigners' problem and one eased mine so I  put some coins in the machine and got a ticket. 

The first stage by monorail was fine but the train I then transferred onto was packed and got more packed at each station.  It was evening rush hour.  I was compressed into a corner where I couldn't see the screen where station names are displayed but I could hear the announcements.  I realised at some point that we had gone past Kanda.  Could I have fallen asleep briefly or what?

I got off and made my way to the platform that would take me back on my tracks.  No-one was heading back into central Tokyo so there was plenty room on the train that pitched up within a few minutes.  I kept my eyes on the display.  As Kanda appeared and the announcement was made I understood.  The intial "k"  was pronounced as a very light nasal "ang" almost a glottal stop and the " d " practically disappeared.  The voice said " 'angda " rather than " Kanda " .

Now I knew where I was going didn't I because I'd been to this hotel before.  Well the streets around the station all look pretty much alike and the station has four exits so no surprise really that I didn't get it right first time.  But I got there and eventually got to bed and had more sleep than I'd got on the plane but not as much as I'd have liked.

The train lunch explanation will have to wait till my next post.