September 13, 2015

Sunday - Cloudy and Rainy with sunny patches

A great day.

F and I had a great visit to Niigata.  We got away early on Saturday, drove to Shibata and went to the Koji Fukiya Art Museum where we saw some of his gorgeous works, plus bought a ton of postcards!  I love his work. He worked in different styles during his life, which I liked.

Some postcards of Koji Fukiya's work.

After that, F and I drove into Niigata and went to another store for postcards for me.  While there I offered to buy F a cup of coffee, which then morphed into us having a “tea time” snack at the restaurant.  It was amazing.  We had what basically was a sandwich, but it was so good.  It looked like it was made with a pita bread, and inside was lettuce, ripe tomato and a slice of nama ham. There was a mayo-mustard mix on the side.  Really, both F and I were impressed with the sandwiches.  

We drove into the downtown area afterwards and checked into our hotel.  We had a nice little room, everything was fine there.  We went out for dinner and found our way to a Spanish restaurant behind the station called Olmo.  F wanted the set menu course so we were eating again!  This was really good though.  We had salad, a meat plate with sausage, chicken, pork and lamb on it, plus pasta, a margarita pizza (the one thing that was a slight letdown as it was soggy…and we’d told the guy that I don’t eat tomato sauce), carpaccio, and a few other things that I can’t remember at the moment.  I even had an alcoholic drink, limoncello with soda which was lovely.

We walked (or waddled) back to the hotel via the station and picked up some cold non-alcoholic drinks on the way.  F had an early night, but I stayed up a bit late watching a movie.

Today, we had an early breakfast at the hotel, then both took showers before we checked out.  We did a little shopping around the station area and stopped for a drink in a cafe.  We put our shopping in the car and then went to the restaurant.  We were there when it opened and got a table for the 4 of us.  We had to wait for the others to join us, and were greatly surprised to see that we were now 5! One of the ladies had brought her daughter.  

We had a really nice meal at Arcoiris.  It is a Mexican restaurant.  F had 3 tacos and I had a beef burrito.  The last time I was there I had had the tacos so decided to be different this time!  The burrito was good.  We spent a pleasant couple of hours at the restaurant and then drove over to the Art Museum.

We all went to see the Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic Paintings exhibition.  I had seen it before, but I loved it even more this time.  One of my friends is an artist so found lots of interesting things about the paintings and it was really special to be able to share some of my favourites with F. 

We spent quite a long time there.  The other three left after a while as the daughter was getting tired, but F and I had a drink in the coffee shop.  Since he was a bit sleepy, we went for a walk around the nearby park when we finished.  

We headed back to the car and I suggested driving to the next city on the way home and having dinner there.  Niigata, while a lovely city, doesn’t always have parking at the restaurants, and the big mall was in the opposite direction from home.  F agreed, so off we went.

We ended up in a Big Boy restaurant and had a good dinner of steak.  I had mine with mushrooms, F had his on rice.  We both had salad and soup bar, mine had curry and rice bar too, and then we both added on drink bar.  

We arrived home quite late.  We’d taken a couple of detours along the way…F was being creative with his driving, and we had picked up some groceries before coming home.  

I watched Project Runway and then F went to bed.  I’m so tired that I’ll be off in a minute too.  We had a really nice time this weekend.  Hurray for that.

Not sure what tomorrow will bring.  I hope to do some laundry and maybe some packing?  Come back later and find out!  Until tomorrow….