Day 14 - 10/01/1998: On the Shinkansen: Tokyo is a very busy city and even Ritsuko doesn't like staying there very long. We left Tokyo on the 8:07 Shinkansen and went to Osaka which isn't really the place to go to escape the big city! However we were meeting Ritsuko's aunty who lives there so that made it better, it's always good if you have a friend in a big city.
We ate breakfast aboard the Shinkansen it was a bento (boxed lunch1) purchased from the train station. Bento are a available from many outlets in Japan priced from 500-1200yen ($6.25-$15AUD) they are basically a plastic box containing rice, pickles, and fish (or other meat, but most commonly fish). It's a good way to get cheep food in Japan, but you'll need to find some where to sit and eat it, which is not easy to find in Japan. However it is perfectly OK to eat them on the Shinkansen or other long distance trains. Some train stations are even famous for the bento that you can buy there.2
In the photo above you can see what it looks like in the ordinary Shinkansen cars. There are also the more luxurious green cars (which I have not yet tried). There are two types of ordinary cars as well, reserved and unreserved3, but each of them have the same types of seating just with the reserved you have to book your seat first, but unreserved are on a first come first served basis 4. As you can see the ordinary cars are pretty spacious.
