oooookay, this day was a bit of not as we had intended it to be, and here's why: first of all, edward snowden has left moscow airport only two days before we got there. secondly we had to queue at the immigration office to have our fingerprints taken and our face photographed (and although i do not like both of the procedures, that was still okay actually compared to), thirdly - and now it really gets tough - our luggage didn't make it onto the airplane. but not just ours, the luggage of all passengers from our flight. so, in order to claim their luggage, everyone from our flight got to some office to fill out forms. this meant queuing again for us. as a side note: a japanese worker said that it's 90% moscow's fault that there is no luggage. i wonder how he got that number. anyhow, after having described our bags and the stuff in it to a nice japanese lady, who spoke surprisingly good english, we thought it's time to get some japanese money. but, for a little extra fun, no ATM in japan currently accepts maestro cards (except dutch and canadian ones), due to a software upgrade on the bank network. yippieh - no luggage, no money! no, we actually got a little money in the end thanks to my visa card. if i think back on my last trip to japan five years ago, when i had no credit card, i wonder what i would have done then. a little richer and happier, we went for the JR office to exchange our JR pass exchange order to a real JR pass. oh, guess what... again queueing there. but from now on it gets a little better. we got on the "N'EX" (which stands for "narita express" and is a train that connects narita airport with tokyo) and changed in tokyo for a shinkansen train to kyoto. we had already booked a ryokan (which, to put it simple, is a hotel in japanese style) a few days before the flight, and luckily we went for one right next to the main station, so we did not have to go far and long when we arrived at kyoto. with several hours delay, due to massive queueing, we finally arrived, pretty late. additionally the ryokan was hard to find, as it did not have any signs on it other than japanese ones. so we compared the signs, and got to the reception wet and soaked, as it also had started to rain while we were searching for it - a little bonus to all the bad karma we received today. the man at the reception already awaited our arrival and said the airport phoned to make sure that it's the right place to send the luggage to, once it is in japan. the people at narita airport really cared for us and tried their best to get everyone's data related to the lost luggage. but as we had no clothes to change (and also no cables to charge our cameras, copy the images to the laptop, etc), we went to kyoto yodobashi, a huge mall where we bought some underwear and t-shirts for the next two days. at a lawson combini shop (which is just like 7/11), we also bought some more stuff that we need. by now it was already about 22:00 o'clock and we got hungry. unfortunately all the bars and restaurants at the food court at the railway station had already closed, so we decided to get some snacks from lawson's. we bought some onigiri - rice balls filled with salmon, seaweed, etc. since they have colour codes and japanese, but no english descriptions on it, we picked some randomly. we liked the green one best, we think it was seaweed. after that, we both were happy to get to bed then. well, this is not the way i remembered japan and not really a nice start for our holidays. we really hope our luggage is arriving soon, because we don't want to buy all the stuff we are missing right now.