Now I am sitting in the front-desk of my first hotel in Kyoto.

Yesterday I was driving (it was raining hard) from Niigata city 2 hours to Tokyo, the todays capital.

I changed the Shinkansen-bullet train (they drive around 300 km/h (Maybe 200 Miles)

to the Shinkansen train to Kyoto, the old capital in Samurai and Shogun-times. It needed another 2,5 hours.

Here I changed again into a small train to Nara. That was the first capital of Japan in the times between 800 and 100 after Christ.

It is very famous for old historical streets and handworker-houses and exspecially for many Buddhist- and Shinto-temples.

In Nara I had the best weather after the rainy morning in Niigata. The tour with the Shinkansen was really enjoyable.

It is very easy to find the trains and gates. You dont have to look for the ticket, you just pass with your Japan-Rail-Road-Pass.

REally a good system. But the trains start right in the second. They dont wait for anyone. Shumpei took all the time-tables for

me out of the internet and the gates as well. So it was even easier for me for the orientation.

It is really great to sit in a real quite hightech train (just like the German ICE-trains (Inter-City-Express) which I never used before.).

You see all the countrysite and landscape like out of a plane. The train is really fast, but I was able to take some pictures from the country.

I saw many rice-fields, temples and exspecially funny advertisement. They love everything what comes from Europe.
So they often give Germany or French or Italian names to their buildings, restaurants, shopping-centres and so on.

In Nara I had a really hard day, again without eating the whole day, because I wanted to keep the time for sightseeing.

All the temple-hills up and down. But I had a great sunset. If you see the pictures, you see someone sitting on a bench

watching the sunset. Just one minute before and the 15 minutes after the picture I was sitting in neighbour to him.
In the train back to Kyoto, to pick up my luggage and find my hotel, I met a great and funny guy from Australia.

He has the same kind of humor like me and maybe looks the same. He explained me many things, because

he lives here in Kyoto and even learned the language. He says he can speak and understand about 20% Japanese.

And while we had dinner together with some Japanese friens of him, was really funny !, I was able to see how

good he was speaking Japanese. In winter he will visit friends in Germany, England, Switzerland and so

I invited him to come to visit us as well. Now I am waiting here at the front-desk of the hotel (good breakfast,

first time without chop-sticks, first time no rice, first time no fish in the morning ! hahahahahah) with free

internet-access for guests and than I will start the sightseeing-tour with him. Because he only work here

and has nightlife and visited some temples. But he wasn´t in the Kaiser-Palace or in the Kyoto-castle.

The only problem now is that outside there is a strong rain. I hope that it will stop early so that we can go on in a dry way.

Now the pictures of yesterday: