March 31, 2018

Saturday - Sunny and windy, lovely day

A good day!

I got up fairly early this morning, for me on a weekend.  I was up around 10, had breakfast then medicine, and was dressed and ready to leave before 12.  F wasn’t exactly.  He did drive me down to the station area and dropped me off.  I was the first to arrive, so I went over to the station to meet my friend that was coming into the city for a visit.  Her train arrived and we said hello.  

The friend that she was staying with arrived with her car, and took some of her baggage, and then went off to do things.  I took the newly-arrived friend over to Foodever and showed her around a little.  The other people weren’t there yet but arrived a short time later.  

We had lunch at Foodever. I had the Italian Lunch again at the fish place. It was good but not as good as it was on Tuesday.  It was nice that we all got to try different dishes and eat together.  Two of the young’uns got to sit together at a different table and do Lego so they were happy!

After lunch was over, the party split up.  My friends from Sakata and Fukushima had to leave, and the rest of us had Plans!

We drove to the Kamo Aquarium and went through it.  They have an amazing collection of jellyfish, and a few other things as well.  We were lucky, by going around 3 pm we missed a lot of the crowd and were able to see so much more than usual.  We got around the aquarium in an hour or so.  Yay us.  We bought a few souvenirs and then went outside.  We climbed a hill beside the aquarium and had a look at the view. It was gorgeous. I wish I had taken more pictures.
Jellyfish are very photogenic!
The view from the hill outside the aquarium.  I huffed and puffed
my way up the steps to the top.  That's Chokai-san in the distance.


After that, we decided to go to Yura, so drove a bit further down the coast.  We stopped and parked and walked across the bridge to the island.  I told them some of the stories about the bridge and showed them some areas to explore in the future.  It was getting cold and the wind was quite strong, so we didn’t want to spend a lot of time there.  

We drove back towards Tsuruoka and then detoured to Mount Takadate. We drove up a very narrow and twisty road to an observation point about halfway up the mountain.  We watched the sunset there for a while before we turned the car around and went down the same twisty road to the main road.  
Sunset from Takadate
We were nearly into Tsuruoka again, when I asked if we could try a coffee shop we’d noticed on the way earlier in the day.  We went in and were quite surprised to see a very Hawaiian-style coffee shop complete with surfboards and Hawaiian coffee.  The shop owner was quite young and after a few minutes of speaking in Japanese to us admitted that he’d lived in Hawaii for 20 years!  My friends had a snack and an apple juice, I had an iced coffee that was really nice.  I decided to text F and see how he was.  When I did, he called me back and I invited him along for dinner after all.  

We met at Kintaro Sushi in Tsuruoka just before 7.  F had put his name on the waiting list for us, so we didn’t have to wait more than ten or fifteen minutes before we were seated.  We had some very nice sushi and we all enjoyed it.  

Afterwards, I got some books from one of my friends and we went our separate ways.  F and I came back to the house via a convenience store for a drink.  He went to bed very soon after we arrived at the house. I think that between his neck and his cold, he’s not having a great time of things. 

I watched some TV and blogged…same as usual really. 


I’m not sure what I’ll get up to tomorrow.  We have an invitation with my friends for dinner but before then? If we can sneak in a movie, it would be great.  There are 4 new movies in English playing locally, but we’ve already seen one of them in Sendai.  I’m not sure if we’ll have the time or energy to go.  F is thinking about having a massage, I’m not sure what I’ll do while he’s having that.  I think, if you really want to know what I get up to on Sunday, you’ll have to come back and find out.  Until tomorrow….

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