January 3, 2012

Tuesday - Sunny and warmish in Sendai, cooler with snow at home.
NY-day recap
I wish that I could tell you that things got better on New Year’s Eve, but on the actual morning of the first, things got very much worse. I won’t go into it, but things were bad.

Things got mildly better in the morning around 11ish. We had a meal, and went to the Shrine for our Hatsumode. It was fine, but took longer than either of us had expected. The weather in Tsuruoka was nice and there were a lot of people waiting.

We came home, packed a bag each and left for Sendai. I didn’t even bother setting up my iPod, I just went to sleep. I was too tired to care. I slept most of the way to Sagae, a rest stop that’s a little over halfway to Sendai. I managed to stay awake after that.

We got to Sendai, found a parkade and then found our hotel. F had found this place and it was okay. I was worried because it was in an area with a lot of drinking places, but the hotel was clean, quiet and comfortable. We went out looking for food and walked quite a few blocks, before coming back and eating at an izakaya near our hotel. After dinner, we came back to the hotel via a convenience store and then went back to our room.

I read 3 newspapers then at 11:30 I went to bed. I was exhausted. I slept almost all of the night, I woke up at 6:30 to find I’d had an email from my sister, then went back to sleep!

On the 2nd, we had breakfast, then went out shopping. We made our pilgrimage to the the Apple Store, but didn’t buy anything. F was eyeing the AirMacs and I was canoodling with an iPod Touch. Or something like that.

We did a lot of shopping that day. Not for anything too amazing, some more postcards, some books…lots of books…and kitchen equipment. I finally got a vegetable peeler. Yay me. We had lunch at a Pepper Steak restaurant, then went to see Paul. It was a hoot. I’d heard about it and got a lot of the funny lines. It was a bit strange even in Sendai to be the only one laughing.

We did more shopping in the station and its area, then had dinner at “our” gyutan restaurant under the station. We just squeaked in before last order. Whew! We ate and then walked back to the hotel. That was a bit of a hike, but it was pleasant.

I stayed up a bit, I was up till a bit after midnight, F fell asleep around 9:30 pm. I was a bit surprised at him.

Today
We had breakfast in the hotel again. It was quite decent and most things were good. Then, we checked out and drove to Nagamachi Mall. That was a bit of a nightmare as our GPS doesn’t always know the right lane to drive in and F will always get into the wrong one!

We parked at the mall, checked on the movie times and then did a bit of exploring around the mall. We looked in a new section of the mall, I did a little shopping while F went to the car for something. I waited for him for ages and he finally showed up. He had been looking around the mall for me. I told him that I wouldn’t have left the store! That would be silly. His phone battery had died so there was no way for us to contact each other. He’d apparently come back to the store, looked for me, but didn’t see me, then moved on. I honestly don’t know how he doesn’t see me!

We had lunch at Lupicia. It wasn’t big, but it was just enough as we weren’t too hungry. After a tad more shopping we went to see Real Steel. That was rather fun. I knew it was supposed to be fairly good for its type, and I thought F would like it, but I wasn’t sure that I would as much.

After the movie, we left the mall and had dinner at a tonkatsu place, then got back on the road. F drove us home. The middle part through the mountains got a bit hairy as there was a lot of snow falling, but we made it back safely.

After buying a few groceries we came home and vegged. I caught up a bit on my email, relaxed a bit. The last couple of days were fairly good, thankfully, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the future to be honest.

That’s it for me. Night.