It took us a couple of trains, but we worked our way to Narita.  Because it was a long journey, and we were saving money by not catching the Narita Express, we decided to spend the extra 700 yen and take the “Green Car”.  These are basically the “First Class” cars, where you get a seat, and even a food service!  I managed to get some work done on the way, and the trip just flew.

At Narita train station, we put my bags in a locker and walked down the main street.  Narita is a very nice town – I’ve only ever seen the airport until now.  We found a restaurant where we watched a man pull a live eel out of a bin (full of them), cut its head, poke a peg through its eye to hold it to the counter, cut it, gut it, and pass it to the person across the table.  He put skewers through it, after which they got cooked, and served up to us on rice for lunch!  That’s about as fresh as it gets!  It would have been ~15 minutes from swimming to being eaten!  The sauce they put on it was delicious, and we polished it all off, washed down with a beer, of course!  It was very refreshing as the weather was really starting to warm up (~27 degrees).

We went to the shrine, and walked around there.  There was a lovely garden to walk through, but very hilly so good exercise too.  But eventually we left and made our way back to the train station.  There we caught a (free) shuttle bus to the hotel we had booked in to for the night.

Our room was really nice.  We had a view of the airport, and could watch planes take off and land.  Eventually we were hungry again, and went up to the top floor for dinner, where we had a few small dishes to eat, and had a beautiful night view of the town.  We then went downstairs to the convenience store, and bought some OJ and a snack to have for breakfast the next morning, intending to have a proper breakfast at the airport, but needing something to keep us going.