Operations Fun + Trip Planning

Today we had a series of lectures from the Shinkansen Operations Division, which deals with train scheduling, passenger facilities, car operations, and customer satisfaction. The coolest fact that we learned was that it would take over 550 Boeing 747's to carry the same number of passengers each way as the Shinkansen does every day. It's the equivalent of 24 jumbo jets taking off at every hour of the day to travel between NY and DC in the states. The train does it with around 200 departures over 17 hours. Thats a lot of people. About 400,000 round trip every day.

We had lunch at a buffet style restaurant on the top floor of a local office building. It had a great view, and was the most filling meal I have had since I got to Japan. Yum.

In other news, I am starting to look into a side trip for when the program is over. I am officially done the night of July 24th, and my flight home is currently not until the 29th. That only leaves a few days to travel, but I also have the option of changing my departure date depending on seat availability. Here is what I was thinking:

1. Go to Hong Kong. I have enough FF miles to get there, and Edson has a friend that lives there. This option would be very cheap if we could stay at his place.

2. Go to Korea. I can easily reach it with FF miles, and probably do business class if I wanted to burn through all of them. Korea is the shortest international flight which is a major plus.

3. Go to Okinawa. I would want to go here just for the diving. There are supposed to be some great reefs and tropical beaches. Theoretically, this would use the least amount of miles but the lady at American Airlines said that she couldn't find any flights available during my dates. I could check again or spend a few hundred traveling there.

4. Go to Hawaii. I don't really have enough miles, and it doesn't make much sense to travel to Hawaii and back to Japan for my flight. But Hawaii is still cool.

5. Go somewhere else. Again, I theoretically have enough miles to get to many other places according to the AA website. I don't know if this is true though because the miles numbers weren't exactly correct on the flights I did check. Anyway, I know I could go to Mongolia for sure as well as maybe the following: Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Guam, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Saipan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam.

Send me an email or leave a comment below if you have any suggestions or ideas for what I should do. If you have been to any of these places, or think I should go to North Korea on a secret mission to disable their nuclear program and prevent "a thousand-fold retaliation", let me know as well.