May 6, 2009 - Wednesday

Hazy and hot.

The last couple of days were very nice. I wasn't sure how they would be, but they turned out well. Fumihiko and I got up on Tuesday and had breakfast in Tsuruoka before hitting the road to Niigata. We made very good time, despite there being a lot of traffic.

When we got to Niigata we checked into our hotel and I tried to call the person we were there to meet up with. No answer. We decided to walk to the bookstore that was near her home so that when we did connect we'd be closer to meet. We got to the bookstore, called again, and got no answer. I decided to look at books and in the first 2 minutes found 2 books that I wanted. Sigh. That meant there'd be more. There always is! After scanning the shelves for a while I had a nice bundle, then Fumihiko discovered that there was a rack of books on for 300 to 500 yen. That is a blooming bargain over here, so I found 3 more that I was interested in. When I got to the checkout I had a nice stack of books. For me. Nothing for my school!

I finally managed to connect with the person, but she wasn't in Niigata. She'd gone to have a barbeque with her family and they'd be back in as soon as possible. They'd call us when they were back in the city. Okay.

Fumihiko and I had dinner and then went back to the bookstore to wait. We heard from her again. They still weren't back. We decided to walk back to our hotel, dump the books and go and see if there was a movie playing that we could go to. We did all that, but there wasn't anything playing that we hadn't seen. Milk was playing but had already begun an hour before.

We ended up meeting her, her husband and two little boys at the Starbucks a little bit later. In fact, we closed out the Starbucks! We were so busy talking that we didn't notice the store had closed! They walked us back part of the way to our hotel and we said goodbye. Even though it wasn't the way we had originally planned, it was nice to meet another international couple!

We went back to the hotel. I watched a bit of a movie and did some crochet, Fumihiko went to sleep. Sigh. He'd had a long day driving and walking around, so I think he was tired. It's only been a month since he had his surgery.

This morning I was awakened by my husband getting up and getting dressed, before 7 am. As we were on vacation I wasn't best pleased and asked him what he was doing. He'd decided to go out to the car to re-charge his phone. Okay. Then, the next thing was he was taking off the clothes he'd just put on and getting back into bed. Why? He'd changed his mind. I asked him later what was wrong and he'd said that he knew where the car keys were but he didn't know where the room key was. Ha! Guess he was worried that I wouldn't let him back in the room afterwards.

Around 9 my alarm went off, and we got dressed and went down for breakfast. We stayed at the former Hotel Niigata. It has now become the Crowne Plaza ANA and is very spiff. The rooms are mostly the same, but the lobby and the elevators have been redone. The restaurant that we had breakfast in was much improved too. We had a really nice buffet there. There was a group of Europeans there too having breakfast so it was neat to hear more than the usual Japanese and English at breakfast.

After breakfast and a bit of a rest, we checked out and then walked over to Love-la. We went up to the bookstore there and of course I found a couple more books and a magazine that I needed, so I got those. We had another coffee at Starbucks and then headed back to the car.

For years I have been telling my husband that there is a mall in Niigata and it has a big theatre in it. Well, today, he finally asked for directions to it, and we tried to find it. We succeeded. Yay. The mall was huge. We checked the movies there, but nothing was playing until too late for us, so we decided to have lunch and then go home. We found a shabu-shabu place that was rather nice, so we had that. After I visited a Kaldi and got some herb tea for my school and some taco shells for us at home.

Our drive home was uneventful, happily and we were home by 7. We rested for a bit and then went out and had dinner. We had okonomiyaki and it was really good. Then, came home and watched part of a movie and Desperate Housewives. It was fun as usual.

This week is over. It's the first Golden Week in years that we hadn't made plans before it started, and it was mostly great. I quite enjoyed it and I don't really want to go back to work yet, but have no choice!

Night!