We were going to walk our overweight and bulging luggage to the subway, but partway there I couldn't take it anymore and flagged a cab. It was early. Our train was scheduled to leave Kyoto at 8:30 or so, which meant it was 7:30 on a Sunday. Everyone was still asleep, even in Japan. We cruised the empty streets of Kawaramachi from the comfort of a cab, zooming by shuttered storefronts. I've only seen this place at night, I think. Maybe once or twice during the day. It is always crowded, but not this early on a Sunday. Take note.

Cafe du Monde didn't open until 8:00 a.m. and couldn't produce beignets for 20 minutes after that. I waited on the beignets while Andrew wandered in search of eki-ben. The beignets took longer than 20 minutes and Andrew found no eki-ben outside the platform. I began to look impatient which caused the Cafe du Monde staff to apologize profusely when the beignets were finally ready. We dashed for the platform, and, with five minutes to spare, rounded up some eki-ben and tea and coffee for the more than three-hour trip to Tokyo.

There's nothing like eating hot beignets with a pick at 300 kilometers per hour, a warm can of Boss Black nestled into the divot in your armrest.

Noon in Tokyo. The station was a swarm. We intended to store our luggage so that we could roam the area around Tokyo Station before we had to catch our 2:00 p.m. train to the airport. But there were no free lockers. A woman at an inforamtion booth told us that the line was so long at the luggage check that it could be 45 minutes just to check the bags. So we took our hulking things out onto the Tokyo streets, rolling heavily across the textures of concrete and pavement.

I wanted to buy a vacuum cleaner. I'd been considering this since I first saw them at Bic Camera days earlier. I've been looking for a new one to replace the huge, suburban-sized one my grandma gave me about 12 years ago. I wanted one like I had in Korea, but you can't find them in the states. We're obsessed with huge things, but I don't want huge. I want compact and powerful, which is exactly what they make in Japan. So I started researching it early on in the trip, grabbing brochures and making my way through the specs. I had decided on the one I wanted, but I couldn't bring myself to buy it earlier because I was afraid of lugging it around the country and I wasn't sure I wanted to risk it not working after I'd traveled all that way with it. So here we were, two hours before catching a train to the airport, lugging the luggage down the street to the Tokyo Station branch of Bic Camera.

I'd picked a Hitachi CV-SL8, a little blue one with a "Burutto" engine. It doesn't require bags, so there won't be a problem trying to find bags in the states. It's light, stores in small places, and the head is small enough that it'll reach into small corners.

All I had to do was point, which you'd think would be the end of the transaction besides the exhange of money. But the young woman minding the vacuum cleaner section had a lot of questions we didn't understand, and her English wasn't up to the task. We did a little bit of that back and forth before she handed us a free duster and then led us to the cash register and let us pay. She came out with a wrapped box, complete with handle, and then began leading us again. We thought she was going to walk us out (not an impossibility in Japan), but she led us to table where a raffle was being held. She gave the people at the table my receipt and they asked me to spin a wire basket full of balls. So I did, but I did it too hard and the balls started flying out. There was a little bit of hubbub while we scrambled to retrieve the balls and then they started over again, only this time one of them spun it for me. A ball came out, they examined it and rang a bell. Apparently, I won 2000 yen. They handed me the certificate, bowed, and gestured in a way that indicated we could leave now. So we did.

I sat with the luggage in the plaza of the International Form while Andrew went back into the store and spent the 2000 yen on a voltage adaptor to use with the vacuum cleaner, just in case. The weather was June again: In the 70's, clear, and breezy. When Andrew returned, we set out in search of lunch. We came upon a bagel sandwich place and decided to stop while the opportunity was there so as not to run out of time. I had a tofu sandwich, which was surprisingly good and made me wish that Americans had a more confident relationship with tofu.

Back at the train station, we arrived at the platform early, this one deep and old. Everyone waiting was headed for the airport, and many were foreigners. The train arrived in two parts and we stood by as the first part emitted little bleeps as it cautiously approached and connected to the second part. It was at once slow and fast. Slow because they were careful, and fast because the trains only needed to ease into each other and snap together like toy trains to be ready to go. No other hook up required.

Our train took a different route than I'd taken before and we traveled some of the time by undeveloped hillsides and fields, which seemed odd for some place so near Tokyo. I don't know if it was a preserve of some kind or some large tract of land used for grazing and farming. It wasn't clear. But the tracks were old and I could tell that a train had cut through this land for a long time.

At the airport, we learned that we had timed everything just right. We returned the phone and waited for our turn in all the usual lines before arriving at our gate not 10 minutes before the plane boarded. I was sad to go and ready to go, too. That strange feeling.

As we waited in line at Immigration in Seattle, we overheard the officer ask a man what he was doing in Japan. He said he was a scientist studying the effects of radiation in Hiroshima.

The officer, surprised, said, "They still have problems over there?"

"Some," the scientist said.