Day Thirty Three: Sendai

it took me about eight hours by train, the trip from Sapporo to sendai

i began in sapporo city, rode on a train to the city at the base of Hokkaido island, hakodate.

from that point, I changed trains and boarded the underwater train. as opposed to having a train that goes in bridges and whatnot, there are two options for getting from Hokkaido to mainland Honshu, you can take a ferry, or take a train that travels in an underground tunnel, something like the English channel train, only better.

so the train went into the long tube from Hokkaido to Honshu. I was glad after I made it out alive. I had never been on a train before that went not only under the ocean, but underneath the ground at the ocean floor. I was a little terrified during the trip that something weird might happen and I wouldn’t be able to live to tell the tale of how I made it out alive.

I arrive in Hachinohe and ride on the shinkansen bound for Tokyo with a stop eventually in sendai

I was in sendai city at sometime around 8pm.

I got out and did a little sightseeing. not much to see when its 8pm at night, so I went to the place where I knew all the folks would be, the entertainment district.

entertainment districts are just smaller versions of las vegas in the middle of larger Japanese cities. its where all the clubs and bars and all that fantastic stuff seems to be, and at night its entertaining to walk around the places and see what kind of things you can see.

in japan, people will randomly come up to you and speak English, I guess trying to practice with you or something. its even more fun when a drunk guy comes up to you, trying to speak English, and half of the words he says, you have never heard before, he is just speaking some hybrid language made of Japanese, greek, with English thrown in to keep you on your toes.

a guy comes up to me and says hello. I ask him whats up and im just looking around to see whats going on in the town. we talk for a while and it was entertaining while it lasted. he seemed like he was weaving a pretty big yarn of crazy mixed up stories.

he claimed he owned five businesses that provided people with massages, of the exotic type. he also said he was forty years old and had a wife in Thailand.

he told me one of his dreams was to eventually open up a guest house or a hostel for world travelers in his wifes city in Thailand. he could tell this would get me going due to the 50lb backpack I was carrying around with me.

I suppose I believed him, what reason would I have had not to?

he told me i could spend the night at his house, which i didnt. he was pretty drunk at the time i met him and eventually after we had been talking for about an hour, he just walked away. i have his phone number though, unless the one he gave me is some weird sensual massage place

from then I walked from the crazy part of town to the front of the station where I slept in an internet café for about six hours and boarded the first train in the morning to Tokyo.


the rising sun was so beautiful.