Hope you enjoy these pictures too! This time instead of getting the Kodak picture CDs (which would have cost $200 for the 20 rolls of film we took), I scanned all of the pictures you'll see myself using my old UMAX scanner. The Kodak scans are definitely much higher quality, but... oh well. My UMAX scans come out very blurry, and I do use a "sharpen" filter, but of course if you over-sharpen the picture starts looking very strange.
What you see here is only a fraction of the >400 pictures I took, and my mom took even more. So if anyone would like to see them all, just let us know, we have them all nicely arranged in albums for viewing. :-)
 | The rail system in Japan, and particularly the Shinkansen (bullet train), are truly amazing. The Chuo line, which runs from Isako's mom's neighborhood to downtown Tokyo, runs 5 different levels of service: local, limited rapid, weekend/holiday limited rapid, commuter limited rapid, and express. So it will take varying lengths of time to get where you want to go, depending on how much you want to spend. Most people seem to take the commuter limited rapid to a stop near their destination, then get off and switch to a limited rapid or local line to get to their final stop. All the times we were randomly wandering around Tokyo/Shinjuku/Ginza/etc., I don't think we ever waited more than 5 minutes for a train, and most of the time there was literally a trail waiting at the platform as we stepped onto the platform. And the Shinkansen, the trains running on the main line between Tokyo and Osaka, each train is 15 cars long and holds about 1500 passengers, and the trains run every 5-10 minutes all day long, and they're often nearly full. |