I’m a big fan of sitting on trains staring aimlessly out the window at whatever happens to be passing by. Give me an iPod and a window seat and I’ll happily sit on my ass for six hours watching rice paddies and apartment buildings flash by outside. It’s right up there with hot springs in terms of therapeutic value. I’d never really ridden any decent distance in a window seat on the Shinkansen before last week though. It turns out it’s a little different though.

The train is going so fast that your brain only has a split second the register, parse and consider what it has just seen. So if there’s a monk who (for whatever reason) has just just walked into the middle of a bridge and decided to set him self on fire (as you do) by the time you’ve clicked that there’s someone (who is on fire) and is standing on a bridge, you a kilometre up the road. You settle into quite a routine of “Oh, that’s int… Wow, that’s inte… Oh, cool… Hey, ni…” that before long you brain just gives up and reduces everything happening outside the window to background noise.

Machine gun input/retardation of output, and all at 260kph.

Posted in Japan on Tuesday August 30, 2005.

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