Kitakata, and my first Couch Surfing experience

After getting over my initial shock of "Huh. I'm in a country where I don't understand the language, and now I'm all alone," I got down to the business of travelling.

Tired, I took the long way home from the airport. The very long way home. The parting happened at 5, so I waited in the station until the train arrived at 6. Then I stayed on the train until it reached Chiba (around 7), then waited for a train to Akihabara, where I arrived at around 8:10. I very quickly found Super Potato (it's 5 storeys, has 6-foot-tall Pac Man and Mario sprites on the front, and emits NES music,) which closed at 8. Oh well, now I knew where to go for the next time I'm in Tokyo.

The next day I struck out early for Kitakata. I took a train from Ueno station to Sendai, then a smaller train to Wakamatsu (which is oh so much fun to say!) My Couch Surfing contact said he'd meet me at 5. It was now noon. Huh. I had time to kill.

So I stashed my backpack and wandered the town. I found a fort that had been destroyed in the 1800s and rebuilt in the 1960s. I found an open wireless access point. I found a retro videogame shop. I found a very uninteresting used clothing store. And I found lunch.

In case I haven't mentioned it before: Japanese have a thing for plastic food. It's a brilliant idea: put plastic representations of the menu in front of the store to entice people to know what they're ordering in advance. As I was hungry (and still somewhat culture-shocked,) I didn't want to bother with the trans-lingual ordering. So I pulled out my camera, took a picture of the plastic representation, went in, pointed to the screen, and pointed. Lo and behold, a real version of the dish appeared on my table! Tasty.

Around 5:30 my CS host shows up. He's had a long day, and it's raining, and the restaurant he wanted to go to is closed. So we decide to get sushi (which was fairly tasty), then go to an onsen (which was a good experience). Afterwards, we headed back to his house, and were promptly wrangled by some of his Japanese friends to go work on a float for an upcoming festival.

The float was, in actuality, a car covered in cardboard. Our task was to cover the cardboard with double-stick tape, then put futon foam on the tape, making it look like a cloud. Their unofficial task was to (1) help with the tape and futon material, (2) chat, (3) smoke, and (4) provide and drink sake. Neither of us Americans (myself or my CS host from Las Vegas) smoked, but we did do all of the rest. Oh boy did we. Eventually we all finished the bottle of sake, at which point they took out "Chuo" (I believe it's called), which is made from [unfermented] potatoes. That was tasty. Then they took out "The hundredth best sake in Japan," (apparently is a common moniker), which we also drank. It, too, was tasty.

At around midnight, we decided that it was just about time to head home, and we bid my newfound friends "Sayonara" and stumbled home. That was a good nights' sleep.


Next time: The hotel room I got from a vending machine, and my visit to a very small town.