Up North...

the sun comes up around 3:30 am! :D Which is a little before we went to bed last night XD The train rides were LONNNNNNG but at least it wasn't like an airplane where your nose gets all dried out and you can't breath. I had bento on the way, and some kaki no tane (spicy little crackers with peanuts--my favorite snacky thing bccause it has protein!! Whoo! Corn potage snacks, you don't own my soul yet!)

The Shinkansen was pretty interesting. Part way through the trip they split the train in half and one half went where I was going (thankfully, the half I was on ;D) and the other went somewhere else! Fast, but not distractingly fast, really. Just smooth and easy.


On the second train, a group of kids on a school trip got on. I was sort of hoping they would sit nearby, but they weren't really. I was soooooo bored.

(Oh, apparently we did take the undersea tunnel, Oleya. It was not very exciting, though. We couldn't like, look out and see fish or anything. My thought it why would you even bother making it undersea if you can't see at least some seaweed or something, but I guss the answer is purely technical or something.)

My PSP wasn't charged, heh, so no Crisis Core ;_;

In fact, neither was my phone, so when I got to Sapporo all I could was wander around looking for a payphone, hoping I would stumble across Three and his gf randomly...

which I did! Sweet!

So we put my junk in a coin locker and went to a curry restaurant where I tried Hayashi rice for the first time. It's really hard to explain that sauce. It's darker than curry sauce, but doesn't taste like curry. It tastes like...well, like this, heh. Red wine and tomato sauce? Sure. Mushrooms, definitely. Super super tastey, but this place's was a little too oily for my liking, almost like they drizzled oil over the top instead of cream.

After that we went walked downtown a bit, went to a big arcade. Managed to thread past the UFO catchers without trying to grab even a single adorable stuffed animal, and then played some Drum Mania.

Then it was getting late. Time to hop on the train. It was a fun ride, trading stories about silly things. Got off the train and into Melissa's car to drive to the smallest town in Japan, Utashinai. Just under 5,000 people. No high school! Whoo. It's pretty chilly. I guess sort of like San Francisco weather, although when I left San Francisco it was beaaaauuuuutiful. I hope we didn't use up all the nice warm days, cuz I will want some more when I come back.


This morning Melissa is using expert egg wrangling skills to provide breakfast. I had one over hard with fluffy Japanese toast, and some banana and yogurt. She's a good cook, and the kind that likes the kitchen to herself, so Three is playing Monster Hunter and I am blogging...

Today, no plans, really. Just gonna check out the area, probably grocery shop and rent a movie for the evening. Chillin' sounds very nice, though. His apt is pretty cool, so I'll definitely grab some pictures of that before I leave :D