The shuttle has the first Internet access we have found, and if all went well a blog and a couple of short notes got out.

Haneda airport is much more oriented to domestic flights, so it is a much more ‘Japanese’ place. There is less English spoken or understood here. We fly into Itami airport in Osaka, another mainly domestic facility. These places give us our first clues: there are far more people speaking far less English here than we were given to expect.

Our tour leaves in a few hours from Sannomiya Station in Kobe, and we learn that a shuttle goes directly there. We figure out how to feed yen into a vending machine to get a ticket and are feeling quite proud of ourselves.

The station turns out to be very large and if anyone speaks English here they are not admitting it. We finally find a policeman who gives us directions to the place we expect to rendezvous for the tour. I would call someone to make sure, but pay phones remain beyond our abilities and the iPhone, expected only to be expensive to operate, turns out to be useless.

The meeting place is easy enough to find, so we spend a little of the extra time we have in an underground shopping center, then it occurs to me that we should have some more yen before we go into the countryside.

Leaving Jo to wait for someone we might recognize at the meeting point, I go off in search of yen. My attempt to find a currency exchange turns into an exercise in bowing and practice in my Japanese for “thank you.” I become good entertainment for a banking office full of giggling Japanese women, one of whom understands just enough English to give me a map to the closest exchange. It has been a fun little exercise, though I don’t come up with any more yen.

By this time, a few folks have collected at the rendezvous, where a rich mixture of French, English, and Japanese is keeping everyone busy. But these are our people. We will have little to worry about for the next two days of the tour, other than what that is on our plate and how we should eat it.