Sunday, June 3rd …..

Marilyn and I are avid people-watchers and Japan is a great place to indulge in our hobby. The population is so uniform that unusual people stand out. On the train today we found ourselves sharing a row of seats with a young woman from Cambridge, UK. She was traveling alone and was coming to the end of her Japanese holiday. She was clearly shy and was reading a book called Alex’s Adventures in Numberland. Working with people with autism makes us ultra-sensitive but we couldn’t help wondering whether she had Aspergers.

On the Romantic train the other day, a young man sat in the seat opposite. He never made eye contact and looked decidedly uncomfortable, holding his bag on his lap and clutching a clipboard with numbers written on it. Perhaps they were the numbers of the different locomotives he had seen. A Japanese trainspotter, perhaps.

This morning, we had booked a taxi for 8.15 and the train for 9.40 but, again, we were up early, hailed a taxi in the street, were having breakfast by 7.30 and changed our tickets for the 8.13 train instead. Because we had gone straight to Shin-Osaka we weren’t able to have our usual breakfast at the Diamor Mall so went into a Starbucks instead. Marilyn had a ham and cheese muffin and I had a sausage and omelette muffin – very exotic but delicious. We’re not having a lot of trouble making ourselves understood but the staff in Starbucks just couldn’t cope with Marilyn’s order of a small half-strength skinny cappuccino, and a tall flat white. She even picked up the cardboard cup to show them the size I wanted for my flat white. We ended up with a tall cappuccino and a single shot in a tiny cup. Doesn’t matter!

The train trip was uneventful and we were on board by about 1 o’clock. This was by far the slickest check-in we have ever encountered. When we’ve sailed from Sydney it’s been a shambles, Singapore was confusing and Auckland was a nightmare. Today, we just sailed through with no fuss.

I don’t think the ship is full by any means. Mostly Japanese, I suppose but we hear there are 100 Koreans getting off in Busan, a good number of Chinese, enough pommies to make an impression and more than a few Australians. We’ve only noticed a handful of Americans but they are hard to overlook. At the check-in, we had handed over our luggage and were sent to a different area to fill in visa papers for Russia. A couple of Americans were behind us and, instead of sussing out what was going on, one of them yelled, ‘Where do I check in?’ That doesn’t go down well with the well-mannered Japanese.
The ship is beautiful, spotlessly clean and not showing its age at all.

We had the usual muster at 5 o’clock for lifeboat drill and we experienced for the first time the joys of a multi-cultural passenger list. Everything was repeated in 4 languages – English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Marilyn says she heard another European language in there as well but I had tuned off. The same thing occurred at the Welcome Show in the evening. The Cruise Director stood on stage with two off-siders and gave his spiel which was translated into Japanese and Chinese. The Cruise Director is from Seattle, the Japanese interpreter is from Brazil, the Chinese speaker is from China, the Programs Manager is from India so it’s a polyglot lot