Sendai Fish Market
For breakfast, we decided to go to the fish market near our hotel to get some really fresh sashimi, as Steph has been craving them since she got pregnant. Unlike in Australia, Japanese women here are encouraged to eat raw fish as it is very nutritiously beneficial to the growing baby. Plus I'd imagine the standard here is incomparable to anywhere else in the world.
The weird biological grenade-looking thing is a hoya, or sea pineapple. We were too scared to eat it.
The oysters we had were GIGANTIC. We're talking... maybe 10cm across for the fleshy part. All three types of oysters were amazingly fresh! So was everything else actually.
Yamagata
We checked out of our hotel in Sendai and got a Toyota Yaris for rent. We're now free from the shackles of public transport! We can go anywhere, do anything and be anything.
So we now continue our journey to Miyagi, of the Yamagata prefecture.
Tolls!
Our car rental did not come with an ETC card, even though we expressly ordered one! It means paying cash on the tolls instead of automatically. This lead to a lot of stressful "Oh God, what lane am I meant to be in???" or "Aaaah, I don't have enough cash" or "There's a car right behind me, I don't have time!".
Luckily after enough failures, we now know how to pay for tolls like normal people.
Anyway, first stop.
Hard Off store
So we went to Hard Off, not to be confused by its more exciting cousin, Hard On.
It's a gigantic op shop on the outskirt of town, and you can't get there by train - You have to drive. Think of it like Salvation Army but on steroids. I find that Japanese people in general:
- Take REALLY good care of their stuff
- Are really good at recycling
- Like to give back to the community
What remains are superstores like Hard Off, Book Off, House Off, and Hobby Off, which receive all of these second hand items and refurbishes everything. You can find ancient technologies and relics from another time.
Remember these things? GameCube, SNES, Famicom and even the legendary Virtual Boy.
This camcorder weighed a tonne, maybe 3kg? I wonder what kind of quality video it has.
Meanwhile on the other side of the shop, Steph was excited about the crockery. They were super cute! Also some iridescent salad bowls. Sadly they weighed a lot so we didn't end up getting them.
Randoseru backpacks were also available here.
Zao Fox Village
So apparently there's a place full of foxes deep in the countryside of Japan. Steph is part fox, so we had to check it out.
You can see the resemblance right?
There were signs everywhere!
The staff showed us a credit card that was bitten and mangled to try and scare us into taking their warnings seriously. Foxes will also steal and bury any items we may accidentally drop. Steph's dog Nero has done both of these things to my wallet and driver's license (on 2 separate occasions) before so it's nothing new. 🤷♂️
We were also warned not to bend down, touch, or feed the foxes, which was highly disappointing considering they advertised that we could do that.
There were foxes everywhere too! Most of them were just sleeping and chilling out though.
Super cute and curled up, beasts of destruction they are.
Some of them don't even look like foxes, these looked like sheep dogs or chow chows.
One sakura was in full bloom when we got there! Nice to see, since we were kinda sad we missed the bloom at the previous place.
There was a huge fox brawl that we got to witness, which from what we can tell, doesn't happen that often. 50 v 50! Or at least it felt like it.
Now this is kinda random but there was a car in the carpark that was FILLED with soft toys. I mean fully filled. Only the driver's seat was even available.
Random Pizza Pitstop - Togatta Onsen Nakamichi
Along the way, we suddenly felt like... PIZZA!
The view was nice-ish. Sakura in the distance, big river in the middle which has probably seen better days. A lot of Japan looks 'semi run-down' actually.
Hopped out of the car, and did a quick search for pizza. We found Zao Enso.
We got our bacon-corn-cheese pizza which was actually really good! We were probably the only foreign customers the guy has seen all day. Also, notice the bookshelf full of manga at the back.
