On the way to Toyama

 I got off at the station and looked around for the entrance to the other train line that I was supposed to take, but I could not find it anyway in the small station. So, I went to the ticket window and called out, asking if there was anyone there. After a short while, a man came out of a backroom. I asked where the entrance was and he said that there was none. After a bit more explanation, we discovered that I had got off at the wrong stop. He checked the schedule and found that there were no other trains that would allow me to make my connection, so he called the local cab company and after a short consultation with the dispatcher, order me a cab. While we were waiting, I asked him to pronounce the names of the two stations. Although they were completely different and in theory consisted of a different number of syllables, I could not tell the difference.

The cab arrived and after a radio discussion between the driver and the dispatcher he took me to a third station. My train would stop there after it stopped at the station where I originally planned to catch it. Again, I had the driver pronounce the names of the stations that I had mixed up and again I could not hear any difference, especially when there was a surrounding context. Anyway, I got to the third station more than twenty early and it only cost 1,200 yen, so there was no problem and I got to see a bit more of the countryside.

The station did not have an attendant. You just walked in and waited. There was a machine for buying a ticket but there was nothing to check if you had a ticket when you got off.

 I went out on the platform and looked around. Directly in front of me was this picturesque house.

 A little to the left was this group of trees.

 This is looking up the track in the direction I was planning to go.

 This is in the direction that I should have come from. Notice that it had started snowing hard so the scenery in the distance disappeared entirely.

One thing you may not have notice. There is only one track. The trains run in both directions on the same track and they are only about five minutes apart. Scary but I decided that, since I had never heard of an accident on this line and it would have been big news, there would be no problem.

 I went outside and looked in the opposite direction and saw more farmhouses, and more snow.

 My train consisted of only two cars, but it was clean and fairly new. Here most of the riders were getting off at a station next to a ski resort.

I took this picture out the window on the opposite side of the train. The white streak in the sky is a reflection on the window, not a UFO.