Murder on the Orient Express

The sleeper train has been quiet. Eerily quiet. Seriously, there are probably 12 people on the entire train. So, as I venture through the different train cars, I'm always wondering if somebody will come murder me. There aren't enough people on the train to "protect" me (i.e., no crowd to prevent the murder from occurring). What if I went head to head with some ninja in one of the trains? I have the sleeping robe suit. Maybe that would give me superhuman powers... Well, the one thing that is strange is that Yale and I are neighbors—through a wall. They didn't put us together, so I might have a stranger as my bunkmate. Hopefully, the guy will be nice enough to switch (whenever he jumps on board). I'll have to speak with the conductor one more time about this.

Early the Next Morning

OK, so the conductor came by and I explained to him the situation and he said he'd take care of it (which he did b/c Yale was sleeping in the next bunk when I woke up). Yale thinks he heard the man come in about 1:30 am, but I was passed out, so I have no idea. For the record, I wasn't murdered on the train, but some drunken guy came to chat with us last night around 10:00 pm. He started speaking in Japanese and then attempted to speak in English—noble attempt, I must say since my Japanese isn't that good. He also popped in about 5:10 am (our train was scheduled to arrive at 5:21 am in Hiroshima). I was a little concerned when 5:21 am rolled around and we were still in the countryside. Our good friend had sobered up a little bit, so he went and spoke with the conductor about the situation. I kept thinking about some horrible situation where we had to switch trains (even though this was a sleeper train) and we missed a connection in the middle of the night. It turns out that there was an accident on one of the lines, so we pulled into Hiroshima about 6:50 am.

J-Hoppers Hostel

Normally, we're supposed to check in to the hostel at 3:00 pm. So, when we showed up about 7:40 am, I was 1) hoping that the front door was not locked and 2) that we could at least drop off our luggage. I was elated to find out that the place was open and not only could we drop off our luggage, but we could actually check in (since the room wasn't used last night). Oh yeah, even though our hostel in Tokyo met our needs, we totally got hooked up here in Hiroshima. This hostel is so freakin' nice!