This morning Alex and I got up at a very reasonable time between 9 and 10, gathered our stuff, and traveled to Tokyo station to catch a Shinkansen (bullet train) for Yamagata. Buying tickets for the train was really confusing. First we had to to by a train ticket (densha no kippu), and then we had to go stand in a totally separate line to get the shinkansen fare (jyoshanken) as well.
[Aside: While waiting in line for jyoshanken, we were standing behind a guy who for some reason thought it was acceptable to wear a sweater that says "I FUCK ON THE FIRST DATE." It's not just America, people. Terribleness happens everywhere.]
With a bit of time to kill before the train left, we went to the Tokyo Station Market, and bought densha bento (train box lunch). Tons of people were grabbing food there, and Alex tells me it's a very Japanese way to eat while traveling. I got a tonkatsu bento, and a steam bun filled with red bean paste. I also got to try some of the cheese cake filled mochi balls that Alex bought. I still think that cheese cake filling is a suspicious addition to mochi, but it was undeniably delicious.
We didn't buy reserved seats for the train, but Alex was pretty confident we'd be able to find seats, until we got to the platform and realized the long lines of people there were all waiting to get on the same train car as us. Alex got in line and I bought us some drinks from a vendor on the platform (turns out that green lemonade is actually limeade).
Then we were boarding, and some people scrambled, but we managed to get seats together without a problem. We talked on the train, Alex slept, I journaled. We went past Fukushima, which didn't stand out in any way considering how quickly we were going, except that the mountains, fields, and houses were incredibly picturesque:
Consider this the first in a series of pictures of Alex sleeping on trains moving past beautiful landscapes. For once, I wasn't the one sleeping through travels!
We got to the Yamagata station and there was some cool lego art made by local kids, a giant lego shinkansen, and an art piece made from a section of carpet titled Moss, which looked aptly named. We wandered out of the station, with me leading and Alex looking up hotels on his phone, and found the Yamagata castle. Nowadays, the castle grounds are mainly a sports center with only a small bit of mostly reconstructed castle remaining.
Alex wasn't having luck finding any openings in hotels, so we went back into town and asked around directly. Two hotels immediately turned us down as they were so full, so we went back to Yamagata station and found an information desk where Alex was able to get some contact info for hotels that might have openings. He called around and most of them were full, but one had an opening for one night only. We took that one, even though they made fun of Alex when he didn't recognize the word they used for breakfast (chuushoku).
Walking to our hotel, we found the real downtown Yamagata, which had been on the opposite side of the station that we originally left from. The town had initially reminded me of any 'little-big' city that you might find in western North America, but the actual downtown felt like a Japanese city, with an Italian karaoke bar, a Southern food bar called Louisiana Hurricane, and a very well stocked model shop that displayed an amazingly detailed Y-wing model.
The hotel itself was total crap, smoke-filled,and getting close to falling apart. The staff assured us that we were lucky to find a place to sleep at all. With no other options in town, we looked up hotels in the nearby mountain town of Zao Onsen ("shopkeeper-king hotsprings") and found a room with twin beds to stay for Sunday night. For dinner, we went on the information desk's recommendation and ate at a soba noodle (the regional specialty) place that is said to be older than any other soba restaurant in Yamagata. We had tempura on hot soba with warm sake. The tempura was super fresh and lightly cooked. Our waitress knew a little English, and was (maybe) a little happy to practice on us while Alex forced me to try ordering our food in Japanese.
After dinner we went back to the downtown in search of a department store, but the entire city felt like it was closed or closing by 8:30, which was real strange for a place that had NO OPEN HOTEL ROOMS and a three day weekend (Monday would be national Sports Day). Alex tried looking up something to do, and we settled on finding the Sega World arcade.
We took a train, and the station we got off at was being renovated, so there was no way to tag off with our transit cards. We walked on anyway through a super quiet neighborhood down dark streets, under a low, creepy underpass, and past a park to a giant warehouse called the Sega Batting Center. Guessing that we were at the right place, and having never been to a batting center, we went upstairs past the arcade and took turns trying to hit baseballs at 90 km/h. I managed to do alright until the machine that was hurling baseballs at me stopped adjusting for height and pitched the balls at about the level of my knees.
In the arcade, we played a taiko game, Mario Cart, and a weird Final Fantasy game that was supposed to be multiplayer, but it would only let me play the tutorial over and over again while Alex faced off against internet people. There was also a game called Groove Coaster, where you sort of played as a DJ by record-scratching and pressing buttons to the music.
We went back to the hotel via taxi so we wouldn't have to wait an hour for the last train. We found the taxi parked at a 7&I (the Japanese version of 7/11), and waited for the driver who was inside thinking about buying some porn. He eventually came out and drove us back while watching a Japanese noir movie, and definitely ran several red lights. Fortunately, we made it back alive.
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