wakooltravelblog: KOFU!!!!

In 1987 I was an exchange student for a year with Rotary to the town of Kofu, in Yamanashi prefecture. Today we all headed to Kofu for a few days of catching up with my host family and enjoy exploring Kofu together.

We had quite an adventure in Shinjuku station - we bought our tickets for the train to Kofu (including chosing our seats), but when we tried to go through the ticket barrier it just wouldn't let us through. After speaking with the staff a kind lady took us to the machine - it seems we had bought tickets for the express train, but we also needed a ticket to get to Kofu as well (much muttering under S's breath about what a stupid system it was). The problem was the kind lady couldn't work out how to use the ticket machine (she was a train information desk staff member, so we had no chance). In the end at 2.58 when all seemed doomed, she got us to buy a 130yen ticket to just get us through the electronic ticket barrier, and then we would pay extra on the train, or at our destination (which is what we did in Kofu). However, this required us running like crazy Gaijin through Shinjuku station racing for the train (poor J, she had to do it all on crutches, and it really hurt her foot). We got on the train at the first available car (car 4), and 10 seconds later the train left, with us walking through to car 11 - but we made the train to Kofu!!!!

Here are our train tickets - really we did book and pay for them.

We were very excited to see that there was snow on the ground as we approached Kofu. There was no snow on the ground in Kofu itself, but it was snowing on the hills around Kofu. Tomorrow we will try and take photos of Kofu so you can see what it looks like - it is in a basin, with tall mountains around it, including Mt Fuji.