The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

I think we spent a grand total of 2 hours awake and in our apartment this weekend.

On Saturday at 11 am, Kevin and Saori arrived from Tokyo on the bullet train. We spent the morning making sure the place was acceptably tidy and the spare bedding was clean and dry, then rushed out to Sendai to meet them. As quickly as we could, we headed back to Natori and stopped in at the best soba restaurant in all Japan for some noodles and tempura. The weather was crisp and sunny, with only a little wind; after lunch, we headed home and rigged up all four of our bikes to go for a long ride around Natori.

First, Jen took us out to the Kumano shrine in the Northern end of Natori, the same place we went to sometime around October to see Kagura dancing, and where Jen once took Mom. I've only been there for Kagura, and it was nice to see the shrine and have free reign to explore! It turns out that the back area of the shrine is:
1) accessible, and
2) untended.
These are awesome for a dude like me. I love exploring, and we really got to poke around the less touristy areas of the shrine, where various bric-a-brac have collected over the years and the pine fronds lie thick on the gravel. It was amazing, and I'm looking forward to putting up the pictures. It was really fun to get to take Kevin and Saori around the town like that, to places they couldn't go in an area as populated as Tokyo.

After the Kumano shrine, we drifted gradually back towards the apartment, stopping frequently at nearly anything that caught our interest. Roadside shrines, temples, interesting old houses; the shrines and temples, being public, occupied more of our time in general. Our last stop was a relatively new temple near our house, notable for its rather lovely graveyard climbing up the hills near Natori Sports Park. It turns into a nature trail further up the hill, which we didn't explore in much depth. Jen and I might -should - head up there more often. It was lots of fun biking around in our backyard; despite knowing Natori very well, we often find new places we haven't been before.

Once it started getting darker and colder, we went home for a tea break, and then out to Sendai. There, we played in an arcade - the first good chance Jen and I have had to do that together. Jen of course had fun with Tekken 6, not surprising given her tendencies to violence. She was a little too good; Kevin went down quite fast, and I had to relieve him to take her down a peg. I'm not sure where she gets her twitch reactions. We also had a great time playing House of the Dead, a lightgun shooter game; Kevin and I played while Jen and Saori watched, but despite not playing Jen decided she wanted to get the Resident Evil game for the wii that has the same play style ("Biohazard: Umbrella Chronicles" here in Japan). We got that just yesterday in fact, and stayed up late shooting zombies, but I digress.

Mm. I got a rice cracker and a coffee. I am a happy dude.

We wanted to go for gyutan - cow tongue - for dinner, as it is something of a specialty in Sendai. However, it turned out to be a little tough to find an appealing gyutan restaurant. I know Beko Masamune is pretty good, but they had a half hour waiting list for seats, and they tend to be a little expensive for quality. In the end, after hunting for a dinner place in Sendai for a while, we zipped back to Natori to a place Jen and I have been before, with Alisa, for her goodbye party. It made me miss Alisa a lot, especially since it was her birthday in Japan time when we went. The place we went is called Rikyu, and if I'd known that at the time I could have found out that there is a Rikyu in Sendai not far from where we were hunting for restaurants. Now I know, so I know where to go for cow tongue when I'm in S-land. We had a great dinner, with sausage and barbequed tongue and a good salad and, my favourite, a bizarre spring roll deal with cheese, miso, and cow tongue. Who would have expected that to be delicious? Amazingly, after a small feast, a large decanter of sake, and three glasses of apricot cocktail (anzu sour), the bill only came to 1600 yen each. We'll be going to Rikyu again I think.

The next day, we were scheduled to meet Mr. Saito in Sendai to watch Rakugo again. I last experienced this traditional comic storytelling around this time last year. We took Kevin and Saori in with us, said our goodbyes, and cut them free to explore Aoba castle and see some of the town on their own.

Rakugo was a lot of fun! I understood much more than last year, and Jen proved herself to be around the same level as I was last time I came. After the comedy show, we went to an early dinner with our group, and had some early drinks. We managed to cut ourselves back to keep from getting too silly on a sunday, which was very good because we wound up going from party to party from 4:30 to ten PM. First we had a delicious feast of japanese food: fried sesame-battered fish, chicken wings in sweet sauce, omelette-like eggs, vegetable and fish soup, sashimi, and much more. When our drinks and food ran out, we moved on to a karaoke bar, where we snacked on fried food a little, drank more beer, and sang until we were hoarse. Jen and I entertained the crowd with such classics as Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life", and we participated as best we could in the Japanese music. Everyone was very sloshed: we, being only rather tipsy, felt like islands of normalcy. The next day at work, Saito was too sick to come in. I managed to make it, fortunately enough as one of my teachers was away and I had to cover for her.

All in all, we had a fantastic weekend, even counting the friday. However, it left us exhausted and our house a clutter: we're looking forward to a weekend where we can rest, play smash brothers (out on Thursday!), shoot zombies, and chill out. This social life is tough!!