Sunny and warm, relatively!
Well, today was a pretty good day. I went to work a few minutes early, which was a good thing since I had an unexpected class today. However, it went well.
After work I went out with my manager to Benkei. We had a nice meal and a great chat about music and movies. She seems to love movies as much as I do. That's rare.
I came back to the apartment afterwards and watched the end of Roswell, then I watched today's episode of Oliver Beene. And, that's about it! Not very exciting. I'll be a bit busy at work tomorrow so I should get to bed reasonably soon!
However, I promised you an update of my trip to Sado. Well, here goes....
On Friday we took the train to Niigata and then the Jet Foil to Sado Island. At the island, Fumihiko called a car rental company and they picked us up. We rented a car and then set off to explore. We checked into the hotel first then went for a drive. The hotel was nice, traditional Japanese style, but the hallways were really cold. We had a delicious supper including sashimi, frozen persimmon and crab. We each took a bath in the onsen after dinner...Japanese style.
In the morning we had breakfast then left the hotel. We drove to the other side of the island and on the way visited a temple. It was supposed to look a bit like Kiyomizudera in Kyoto, but it was about 1/10th of the size! We did see some wild ferret-like animals there, that was interesting. We ended up at a museum that I'd been to before, it told the story of Sado with robot-puppets. That was cool. Then we went to the Gold Park. I wouldn't have bothered going by myself, but Fumihiko wanted to go. We ended up panning for gold... and found some. I'm pretty sure the workers salt the beds regularly, but it was fun. We were hungry then, but the restaurants were closed. We ended up going to a convenience store, buying stuff and taking it to the beach for a picnic. The picnic was great, very romantic! After that we decided to go to the hotel. We drove, and drove and drove, and ended up almost halfway around the island, in the wrong direction. Oh my. We drove back and checked into our next hotel.
It was a little bit older hotel...nice, comfortable, but not in the best of condition. I liked it though. We had a nice dinner, including sashimi, frozen persimmons, and crab. We had baths in the evening too.
In the morning we had breakfast then headed out on our way. Fumihiko wanted to go out on a glass bottomed boat, but unfortunately they weren't open yet. Then, we decided to go somewhere else but it wasn't open either. We ended up going to the Aikawa Folk Museum. It was okay, but not great, until I noticed that we could take a class in making pottery. So, we did. We each made a cup out of pottery. It was really great. Very very interesting. Honestly. We'll get our cups in a few weeks.
We were hungry so we drove to Mano to go to a steak restaurant. It was much further away than we thought, but we had a great lunch there. After that, we drove back and went to the Gold Mine. It was my second time to go there, but this time there was actually English signs, so I could understand much more. It was pretty interesting.
After the gold mine we drove to the hotel. This one was really nice. It was also the most expensive place that we stayed. We checked in and decided to take a bath before dinner. It was the nicest one that we visited this weekend, and it had a rotenburo...an outside bath. It was heavenly. Dinner was good too. We had sashimi, frozen persimmon and of course crab. Honestly, we ate too much crab this weekend. It was good but every day? After dinner we digested for a while and then we took another bath. That was rather nice. I stayed up and read for a while, I was desperate to finish my book and find out what happened.
In the morning Fumihiko took 2 baths while I slept. I didn't know he was that dirty! We drove back to the port, stopping along the way to visit a temple and look for lunch. We couldn't find any lunch along the way, but in Ryotsu we found a nice little steak restaurant and had a wonderful steak. It was also wonderfully expensive too. Then, we took the car back and got the agency to drop us off at the port. We were early for our ferry, so Fumihiko asked to see if we could take the other one. We had planned to take the slower boat back, but we were able to take the jetfoil back. Hurray! That meant that we were able to do a bit of shopping in Niigata before going home. We went to Starbucks and then Kinokuniya books where I stocked up on magazines. Hurray for me!
The train ride home was uneventful and I think I've filled you in on the other stuff we did that day in my regular entry.
Sado was great. I highly recommend it as a place to go and relax.
I gotta go...it's really late! Night night.
sign my guestbook
