Riding 6 Horses at Once

So after being here in my remote town that is highly isolated for over a year, I decided it was time to find a way to make things a little easier.

Yesterday I woke up at 5AM. Why you ask? Because I live far away from everything. Trains upon trains upon trains away from my destination for the day. The destination being a city called Moriyama. Having to transfer at 3 stations and a bus ride, about 2 hours later I find myself at the Shiga License Center. That's right! I spent a good whole day, about 12 hours including transport time, getting my Japanese scooter license. Now I can ride anything under 50cc, which basically means 49cc mopeds (approx 6 horses)!

Licensing in Japan is a pain the the ass. Everything is so bureaucratic that it makes the DMV in America look like a cake walk...or maybe not! Anyway, licensing in Japan is super strict. The reason for this is because of a lack of space and the government trying to control the number of vehicles on the road. Probably the most easiest license, the scooter license, takes a whole day with a difficult written test where you can only really miss about 3 questions out of 48 (about half failed), lectures, 2 hour driving course, and some more stuff that I really couldn't understand. Not to mention there was a typhoon happening. Which actually delayed the trains by 20min or so. Which is a big deal in Japan where everything is precisely on time. I got to the license center at 8:30AM and didn't leave until about 4:30PM.

Needless to say, I passed! Thank my lucky stars because I really didn't want to haul my sorry ass back out to the license center and pay another 10,000 yen ($110) if I failed. Not to mention to sign up for the class I have to also go to another city, since my town doesn't have a police office. Like I said, everything is so far away from Hino! But now, that I can drive a scooter, hopefully things will be closer. Most exciting of all, is I don't have to ride my super expensive private train line, the Omi-tetsudo, when I want to go to Kyoto. To get to the JR station I had to pay 400 yen ($4.30) every time! I also had to leave Kyoto by 10PM but now I can stay until 11:30PM, granted I won't be able to drink alcohol since I would be driving which seems like one of the only valid reasons why I would stay that late. BUT, it is nice to have the option and save some cash!

Now I am off to climb to the highest point in Japan (by foot). Mt. Fuji...in a typhoon.