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Taking the Shinkansen (the bullet train) to Sendai. The weather in Sendai was considerably cooler than in Tokyo, and it was raining. My first order of business was to buy an umbrella. I got a cute little blue one -- I wonder why most people carry black ones? Ick it reminds me of the military. Even though I was scantly clad as usual, it is still a pain to get wet. It was warm enough to be comfortable in a tee shirt and capris, and the fact that I had a lot of bare skin made me dry quicker when given the chance.
I employed my usual tactic of watching people and then following the ones who seemed to be going in the direction I wanted to go in. By doing that I successfully located the streets decorated for Tanabata. I made sure to try the hagi no tsuki (little yellow cakes) like the guest services guy told me to (yay for free samples, wow I'm cheap). It was pretty good, not excesively sweet. I don't think could've been able to bring myself to try the gyutan, since he told me what it was (beef tongue). I limit my experimentation to carbohydrates and plants, call me what you will. Though I did see a lot of people eating something spherical on a stick and tried that. I'm still not sure what I ate, and I'll be ok not knowing, it was kinda oily for my tastes. Anyway, another guy had the same idea. He was white and seemed harmless enough so I said hello and asked if he spoke English. He ended up being French, but he spoke English well enough, so I asked if I could tag along with him. So we poked around the streets making idle chit chat. You had to be careful while wading through the decorations otherwise you'd step on a little kid.
His name was Sebastien -- though I didn't find that out until he gave me his email later that night. I had figured that he was in his mid-to-late twenties and was wrong, he was actually only a year older than me. I'm terrible with age. Last year he had spent several months in Tokyo working for Toshiba. Now he was back for vacation and to visit friends. His Japanese was a little bit better than mine, but he was just as nervous, if not more.
We had some time before some parade or dance thing was going to happen so we stopped in a cafe. Enter iced latte number 1. It was totally not as sugar laden as I like, but they have these nifty little sugar syrup packets so its not all grainy at the bottom of your glass.
I couldn't find a common ground with him as easily as I could with the guys in Akihabara, but it wasn't totally unpleasant. Generally thats the way it is with me and people my age or older. I guess I was born a couple years too early or have yet to grow up -- probably the latter. It turned out that he actually did stop into some arcades, but wouldn't play DDR. If there was an arcade I would have shoved him on it, but I hadn't been looking for one too hard. What I also found funny was that last year he and a friend played the Pokemon stamp game, despite the fact that they were two grown up white guys.
Eventually we ventured out on to the soggy streets again and found a spot along the performance area. I found it interesting the way people would randomly open their umbrellas even through there was no sun and it had temporarily stopped raining. I leaned up against a tree to peek through the crowd and ended up with half of my body soaking wet. Though water is not so bad as sweat in my book. Sebastien had went to see the Kanto one in Akita, I had thought about seeing that one, but was too shy to ask during the time it was going on. He said it was pretty cool though, too bad. It ended up being a lot more westernized than either of us expected. I didn't expect to see kids dancing in Lakers and Celtics jerseys (though they were pretty good). And it made me really sad to see the cheerleaders in cowboy-like costumes (man I hate Texas). I wonder if they would have been dressed like that if the US hadn't occupied Japan? *Shudder* stupid Texas and its urban cowboys.
We had dinner at the train station, mmm soba. Though it was kinda hard for me to eat it, maybe because it involves mouth muscles I did usually use. No innuendo intended. He paid for dinner, travelers seem to be really nice. But I missed my train because of dinner, which made me kinda antsy, but I ended up getting seats for the 930pm train so it was ok. Once again we killed time in a cafe -- iced latte number 2. Starbucks in Japan has a size small, its like the size of 2 dixie cups, and the caramel frappuccino didn't have as much sugar as it does in the states. That's not good for me because I hate coffee and need its flavor to be masked by sugar as much as possible. The other thing is, since I hate coffee I don't usualy drink it, this would end up causing me difficulties with sleeping.
I got back to my hotel at 1am, took a shower and couldn't sleep for the life of me. It was like my body was tired, but my brain was buzzing, and I had a 7am train to Kyoto to catch.