pleasedWe boarded the first Line 2 train that arrived, rode it to the end of the line, then back to the other end, then back to Chiba, where we changed to the Line 1 train and rode out to the end of its (much longer) line and back. Lisa shot vast amounts of video, mostly high-res stuff, and burned through the rest of her batteries and mostly ran out of memory sticks. Along with what's on my PC and all seven memory sticks, she's shot more than 40GB of video during this trip. Editing it into usable form looks to be a winter project.
To economize, we changed lines again and rode one stop out Line 2 before exiting the system and walking the 500m back to Chiba Station. Although we were inside the system for about two hours, exiting where we did meant we were charged only the minimum system fare.
The Osaka Monorail is a SAFEGE type, one of only a few of the French-designed underslung monorails ever built. Because of how it's suspended, you somewhat get the feeling that you are flying over the city at about 20 m AGL or so. It's pretty cool, and no amusement-park ride, as shown by how packed our train was as we headed back toward Chiba Station around 1630 or thereabouts. It's a serious piece of transportation in a country that has to move a whole lot of people efficiently.
I composed this message originally (handwritten) on the 1720 Airport Rapid to Narita Airport from Chiba. Our green car emptied out in Chiba's suburbs, and we ended up with a private car (or part of a car -- the green cars on this train are double-deck between the trucks, and we have the upper deck to ourselves) for our final ride on JR during our trip to Japan.
It would be difficult to work out how much we saved over individual fares for the travel we've done these past three weeks, but we think it must have been substantial. Of cours, part of that was that because we had already bought the passes, we had every incentive to use them as much as possible, whether it was a Shinkansen from Tokyo to Hachinohe, the Kamome from Hakata to Nagasaki, or just hopping on the Tokyo loop line for one stop because the station udon was better there than at Shinagawa.
Lisa, who handled our reservations, pointed out to me as I read the above back to her that in some cases, the only reason we got a seat was because we had Green cards, because there were only green seats available. Although not all trains had green cars, if you're going cross country the way we did, I'd have to say that the green card was well worth the difference in price.
It's going to be very difficult to go back to a country with a third-world transportation system.