July 21, 2008 - Monday

Rainy in Sendai, hot and sunny in Tsuruoka.

We're back. We had a great time in Sendai, did a bit of shopping and came home late this afternoon.

Last night we stayed at the Holiday Inn in Sendai. We checked in early and then went shopping for a bit. I bought some magazines at the bookstore and we also picked up some foreign foods at the train station shop. We dropped everything off at our hotel and then went out again to have dinner.

We had the speciality of Sendai, gyutan, or in English, grilled beef tongue. It was very nice. The restaurant is one that we always try to go to, it's in the train station, in the gourmet section underneath. Very yummy.

We had a quiet evening in the hotel. Fumihiko fell asleep fairly early, I stayed up a bit and read and took a bath.

This morning, we had breakfast and then checked out of the hotel. I had asked Fumihiko if we could go to the new Aeon mall in Sendai but he didn't know where it was. He asked at the front desk and then he put the information into the bossy driving computer in the car. It got us there. It was further away than I thought, but a really nice mall. It was bigger than our local Aeon, and it was attached to a train station. If I'm in Sendai alone I suppose I could get there by train. Yay. It was really crowded today. Everywhere we went there were tons of people. I did buy a few things in the mall. I got a water bottle. It's one that you can freeze so it keeps the water really cold. I usually buy a bottle of water or tea when we go somewhere, but I'm trying to be a little more environmentally friendly, so I thought I'd get one to take with me. We got a dvd and I got a cd, then some stuff for our kitchen. We decided that as it was lunchtime and we were hungry, we'd leave the mall. However, I wasn't too sure about our ability to find a decent restaurant quickly, so I bought us some sandwiches. We went back to the car and feasted.

We found a restaurant remarkably quickly after that! Of course. It was just a Milky Way, but we don't have them in Tsuruoka, so it's a treat for me. I was happy to have the salad bar.

We started out on the drive home. Fumihiko was supposed to stop so that we could buy something to drink on the way (seeing as how we didn't have a chance to wash/freeze our new bottles yet), but didn't. I fell asleep on the way home, and when I woke up we were halfway home and at the Sagae rest stop! We took a break there. We had an ice cream cone and got some coffee and water.

Fumihiko didn't want to go home right away, so he suggested that we do something else. I countered by suggesting going to my school. I'd gotten a note from the management ON SATURDAY that someone was coming ON MONDAY to install smoke detectors. Now, I am sincerely glad that we now have smoke detectors there, but am not sure about the wisdom of only giving 2 days notice about it...and the 2 days being on a long weekend. Whatever.

My school was hot, and I'm glad. Fumihiko got to see that I'm not talking out my hat when I complain about the heat there. I started the fan, opened the window and while it didn't cool down, it did become manageable. The guy came in the appointed time slot, and installed the smoke detector.

We had dinner at the sushi restaurant and it was nice. We had to wait for a while, but there was still lots of fish on the conveyor belt. We bought a few groceries after dinner and then came home.

I spent about 3 hours tonight reading email and blog reading. We didn't talk very much, but it was nice and friendly.

That was my day. It was a really nice weekend and we both had a good time. Hurray for that. Tomorrow, back to work and real life. Sigh!

Night night.

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