Never good to miss your stop on a bullet train!

After exploring the Palace ground in Tokyo with my host Takeshi, I boarded the “bullet” train toward the city of Nagoya where I had planned to meet my second host, Yasuyo. Yasuyo is a Music Together teacher as well as a drum circle facilitator and she had invited me to visit her city of Nagoya some months back so I decided this would be a wonderful way to get the chance to travel a bit while in Japan. As you might imagine, the bullet train moves very fast, so fast in fact it is difficult to focus on anything that isn’t quite far away out of the window, so I found myself closing my eyes so as not to feel dizzy. The next thing I knew I heard the announcer call a stop and I gathered my things and headed for the door, then I heard Kyoto over the loud speaker, yikes, had I missed my stop? I asked a young woman who had been sitting in front of me if this was Nagoya, and she made the sign of sleeping and a sad face and pointed to the stop and said Kyoto. Yes indeed I slept right through Nagoya and was 1 hour beyond my stop. (which is pretty far considering it was the bullet train and all). Just as I got off the train and was going into a mild panic state, my cell phone rang- no one has called for days and I am really not using it while overseas, but I answered and an American male voice was on the other end asking if I had missed my stop in Nagoya. It was Yasuyo’s American friend Scott who was helping her try to figure out what had happened to me. Turns out I could slip back through the gate to the other train track and catch the next train back to Nagoya, which I did. So it all turned out ok apart from the fact that dear Yasuyo had to wait around the train station much longer than she had planned.