Okayama (岡山市)

Today's perfectly normal purple colored 500 Shinksansen takes us to Okayama, a township with at least one skyscraper (quite a few in fact).

And similar to Hamamatsu, it has a large international population. For Hamamatsu it was Brazilians, which is why the second language on a lot of signs was Portuguese and not the typical English. Here, it's French. And it certainly showed in a lot of shop names.

Okayama also has street cars! And they have to be the funkiest railed transportation method I have ever used in Japan. The acceleration was provided by a motor from the 19th century that was both very slow to respond and very harsh when it did. The brakes looked like they needed to be hand pumped by the driver to operate. The pot holes in the rails were rivaling those of Australia, sending us swinging all over the rail. Not that it mattered at the whooping 30km/h that we managed to reach on the high speed section. And you could feel every single one.

Most of Japanese rail shuts down at night to provide an open maintenance window. This is not a concern for Okayama who just works while the rail is operating. When I saw the truck and people obviously welding on the rail ahead of us, I assumed they must have closed the rail and I just didn't realize with my lack of Japanese. Right until we approached and they quickly got out of the way (adding some final adjustments with a hammer seconds before we went over).

The tram took us to a fairly generic castle (at least after the last three castles we went past) but a very nice and very curated garden. Unfortunately, being very curated though, they also kick you out at 18:00. So I went and found the next green patch on my map which turned out to be the local meeting spot for all kinds of sports. And that would have been a lot more fun to sit down and watch if the mosquitos didn't seem to chase anything static.