Sendai

Dear diary:

Yesterday I spent the day in Sendai. Right now I'm on a bullet train back to Tokyo. It's about an hour and a half to in total so I have time to write a little. I should probably nap, but I didn't write anything this morning and it's been a sad morning.

So, yesterday we got to Sendai, had touristy food at the train station. Walked to the local park and saw what was left of the cherry blossoms. Apparently they had heavy rain and it's all pretty much gone now. After that we went back to the train station and had more touristy food. Then everyone in my party went to take a nap and I went to visit Olesya. I started walking through this cool gate I saw. I thought it was just a building with a mall in it, but it was... wait for it... infinite. Or at least the thing was so long I couldn't see the end of it. I got a good picture of it from above. There were things to do left and right. There were so many interesting looking people left and right. So awesome. There were suits (or people who I call 'suits' because they're all dressed like they're going to a job interview) and non-conformists and high school students etc. My eyes kept wandering.

The hospital where Olesya was staying was 23 minute walk and I was excited but not super-particularly looking forward to it until I realized that after I got to the other side of the promenade I'd already passed the hospital. I wanted to hang out there more but I wanted to visit my friend. When at the hospital I was supposed to sign in.. but since I couldn't read anything in Japanese I just kept walking past people like I knew where I was going and ended up in the maternity ward, found her room and found her! Happy moment! We chatted for hours. So much to catch up with. So much to talk about. Eventually I got really sleepy. It was 4am in LA and I was collapsing. I had to call it a day and walk back.

I was excited to tell the sleeping gang about the better parts of town but everything was closing on the way back. Well, everything except the red lights district. Which was interesting, but I wasn't adventurous enough to potentially run into a money pit. I got back to the hotel and ultimately Bria and Alan decided to sleep and no go out. Annmarie and I went to explore the night life. We didn't get too touristy... a shop here a weird Japanese sex shop there, and then... the ******ing ******ing. I can't remember the name of the bar. It was a basement hole in the wall. Everything covered up with stickers. Everyone covered in tattoos. Very cool vibe. Nobody spoke a word of English. It was fun. The bartender showed us the photo albums of his visit to West Coast of the US. Interesting things. We had a couple shots each and it came out to $40. Wait what? We had this much alcohol at the touristy part of town earlier that day and it came out to $12. Yeahp. We paid the fucking tourist tax. Ultimately the price is okay, but being taken for chumps didn't feel good.

I'm not sore how long we were out, but it was cool. I would have loved to spend more time there. Sadly some of the gang are hellbent on going to Tokyo. So we left. Otherwise I'd be exploring more. While they were having beef tongue I went to the observation deck in downtown and took photos. There's so much more left to be explored. I've only really been to one store... one flower shop and one hat store. I wanted to see more. Oh well. More reasons to come back I guess.

This morning we woke up early and went to the local Cherry Blossoms festival. Sadly... there weren't many trees in bloom there either. Looks like we missed the season. This was in a town about an hour away from Sendai and I wanted to at least check out the city. But Bria was cold so we headed back. Something was wrong. Maybe it were the winds or something else happened, but the train back went at 20 km/h for a while before coming off all together and off-boarding us to other trains. That was interesting.  We were up at the front of the train so we got a good look at the rail tracks. Got some good photos, too, I think.