Route Inn Shinjo Station-Side

... since we're Japan and they speak Japanese.
After the museum we checked our watches. Not even noon. Ouch.
We wandered in a direction that seemed vaguely rational at the time (perhaps we thought we saw something that way? I can't remember), and stumbled upon what turned out to be a godsend. Beneath an overpass and next to a railway, sat a sad little playground. It had ...

... stopped only at onsen towns in Miyagi, which tells you how fond the Japanese of their bathing. You can tell Naruko is an onsen town the second you step off the train--the air absolutely is saturated with sulphur. It's raining hard when I arrive, but you can still hear the steaming sulphurous water bubbling down the drains underfoot, and the steam rising from random streams along the hills. As a town, it's not much, just a bunch of ryokans and hotels standing on hot springs, and a ...

... calls by the ref, etc. -- and I listen and analyze. Then I shrug and give up. Everything's easier when you're a robot. Not that I didn't celebrate. There's a retired environmental activist in his 70's in my adult class. I had an expensive dinner with him and his wife in the seaside town of Kosagawa to the south. We had rare steak, salad with raw bacon and brown eggs, cheese, and ...

... I did go to Akita City and drink coffee with my Japanese teacher and showed her the bookstore she's apparently never seen before. In fact, she was completely unfamiliar with the area despite having lived here for years, so I found myself in the surreal role of being an American tour guide to a Japanese person in a Japanese city. Then I went home and read an article about bees. And that's about it. Any questions?

... The first train is at 5:00 in the morning, the last train is at 9:00 at night, and they run every two or three hours in Nikaho, avoiding rush hour, happy hour, lunch hour, or any other time during which a train might be needed. To put into perspective the especially large, thick, heavy, and contorted monkey wrench this can throw in a day, I had to ride my mama chari (my cheap, rusty bike) to work today because ...

Nikaho is pinched between the sea and a number of large hills that are all covered in evergreens. The exception is a grassy plateau with massive windmills on it. That's not what makes this place scenic though. Mt. Chokai, on a clear day, rules the skyline with a pointy, snow-spotted peak and a massive, sprawling bulge that rests in two different prefectures. It sprouts up from its foothills and says, "Bow down before me, mortals! Mwa ha ha ha ...

... in the Himalayas, decided to take a nap at the halfway point and invited us to go ahead without him). When the clouds passed and the white-outs cleared, it became obvious that we were frequently taking the most difficult routes imaginable, or the ones most likely to be habitats for bears, and this resulted in cursing in all languages represented by our group. Thus, our adventure was also a cultural exchange.

... my having to reinvent my interests, which is what I do with most beautiful women (i.e. I watched The Notebook with Kurumi-chan a few weeks ago, which was the result of a quite magical reversal on my part into a dubiously heterosexual male who's actually willing to watch The Notebook). And so, if her personality really is the same as mine, I wish she would just admit that the real reason she wears a ...

I had a 75 minute transfer in Shinjo where there just happened to be a festival at the train station today. They had tons of food stalls where I got some food, and one vendor who was cooking live fish on a stick gave me one for free! This was a fun transfer and broke up some of the monotony of riding the local trains continuously.

I am now departing for another long day of riding local trains. I will leave Sakata at 7:51 am and arrive in Hakodate on the northern island of Japan at 10:04 pm. The trains become shorter and fewer the farther north you go in Japan, so I have quite a few hour-long transfers. During that time, I plan to explore whatever city I am in.