What Secrets a Railway Station Holds

New day, new post. Well, actually the day isn't that new anymore. It's almost over. But the post is new, I assure you.

Two rather interesting things have happened in the last couple days. Yesterday I bought the laptop I am currently typing this post on. It's an Acer AspireOne, and it's without doubt the smallest and most portable laptop I have ever owned, or even used. Weighing in on merely 1.1 kilograms, with a screen no more than 9" in size, it nevertheless manages to pack a full gigabyte of RAM, a larger than expected harddrive (at 120GB), a reasonably fast wifi card (802.11g), and a keyboard that's large enough not to be too hard to actually use (unlike that of the main competitor, the Asus EeePC 901). 

It has a nice deep blue color too. All in all, I like it alot. The only thing I don't like is the OS. Having used a Macintosh for the past four years, going back to Windows is not really a pleasant experience. I had initially intended to buy a MacBook of some kind as soon as I got here, but the myriad of unexpected expenses that accompanied this trip soon made that impossible to do. But in the end it did work out pretty good anyway.  Though I am considering taking a serious look at Linux, I have to say.

Today, when on my way to school, I experienced something quite unexpected. The Joban line, which usually takes me halfway to my school in Shinjuku (one of the 23 special wards that make up Tokyo), was at a complete standstill. The station was thus packed with more people than I ever thought could fit in there, everyone waiting for some way to get to work. And all through this chaos were standing JR (Japanese Railways) personnel handing out small notes printed on the paper normally used for tickets, proof for people to give to their companies that they had a legitimite reason being late for work.

It came quite handy for me as well, when I finally arrived at my school a few hours later. By which time I - and the people who were with me - had already had the time to become tired of waiting in that sea of people, left to buy something cold to drink at Starbucks, been standing for a long time waiting outside the station while playing an interesting game of guesswork, given up that too and returned to the guesthouse, studied for a while, and then finally returned to the station to find that the trains had just started running smoothly again. When we reached our destination merely eighty minutes remained of today's classes. But with those prooftickets in hand, it was alright anyway.