February 27, 2011

Sunday - Sunny and windy.

A nice weekend. We left Tsuruoka yesterday and made good time getting to Sendai. We went to the Natori mall first to see if we could go and see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We were able to see it in English, and in 3-D so that was kind of neat. We both enjoyed the movie.

We drove to our hotel next, checked in, and after a bit of relaxation time, went shopping. We did a tour of Maruzen for books, Tower Records for a dvd, Jupiter for some foreign food and then to a nice Indian restaurant for dinner. However, we timed it a little wrong and the Indian restaurant had already closed for the night. NO! I’d been looking forward to some yummy curry for the whole trip.

Instead F and I had a bit of an argument about where to go so we ended up at an Outlet izakaya. Now, I’m not sure about you, but I’m a little suspicious of a restaurant that labels itself an “Outlet”. All the dishes were 290 yen each, and were about as good as you’d expect for that price. I wasn’t too pleased really. Sendai has some really good food places and we had to go to a craptastic one.

We went back to the hotel, watched a bit of TV (in English, I kept the remote!) and then went to sleep.

This morning, F got up early and went for a walk. It’s a weird thing he does sometimes. Still, it was fine as he’s so noisy in the room that him leaving for a while makes it better for my beauty sleep!

We had breakfast later, then checked out and headed over to Nagamachi mall. We parked and discovered that The King’s Speech was playing in a little bit. Yay. I’d seen it, but I wanted F to see it too. We hacked around the mall and I did a little shopping. I got some new tea, a few things at the Muji store and we had some tea at Starbucks.

The movie was great and I think F liked it. It’s hard to tell with him. I thought he was sleeping at first, but he swears not.

After the movie, F suggested going back downtown to have something at another of our restaurants. I was okay with that, but suggested we take the car out of the parking area, and then go back in. The mall only gives 5 hours of free parking, and we were coming up for 4 hours. No way we could get downtown by train and back in the remaining time with a meal in there too. He seemed to misunderstand and so we left the mall and he drove downtown. Huh? Halfway there, he turned back to the mall and we ate a place near the mall. It was okay, but not very exciting. I had been trying to explain to him that there were a bunch of cool places along the road leading to the highway. We could have tried any of them. He didn’t understand what I meant.

After dinner we left the city and got on the highway. I dozed a little but mostly stayed awake. We stopped for supplies at Sagae and F told me that there was an avalanche on our way. He heard an announcement at the rest stop about it. He said we’d take the free road and not the paid highway to avoid it. We get along the road, exit at the right place, and are told that we can’t go that way as the avalance blocked the free road too. Sigh. We had to back track to Sagae again, and then some, before going a much slower way home.

We had a quick dinner at Marumatsu and then bought a few groceries. We came home and vegged for a while before F went to bed.

It was quite a nice weekend really. Apart from a bit of frustration over food, it was a nice time.

Got to go! Night.

2 comments:

Rachel said...

Sounds like a nice weekend! I can't believe you were stopped by an avalanche! At least it wasn't on top of you I suppose.

Helen said...

That is so true! I'm glad the avalanche wasn't on top of us!

I haven't found any details about it yet on the news though. I guess they don't think it's important enough to put in English??!!