Day 4 (18 Sep 2018) : Visit Sendai
After hours of travelling on the overnight bus, we finally arrived at Sendai at 5+am in the morning.
The temperature here was much cooler than Tokyo, and I finally could put my jacket into use.
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| Sun is just rising, and we were walking to our hotel from the bus drop off point. |
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| Sendai Station |
Since it was still too early to check-in to our hotel, so we just deposited our luggage bags at the hotel, and went for a walk around for a stroll to look for places where we can spend some time to rest while waiting for shops to open.
This is how we ended up at a Manga cafe (DICE) near the Don Quijote store as well as our hotel.
This particular chain of manga cafe requires membership signup, so we spent some time trying to figure out how to sign up for the membership, since everything was in Japanese, and both myself and the staff there was trying to figure out how to fill in the address section of the membership form, since there wasn't an option for me to select for my country (the form caters to Japan address).
This chain seemed to be slightly more expensive (compared to the others I've been to previously), but then, it's fast becoming my fav manga cafe chain. We got a 3hr pack, and chose a private soundproofed room where we could also sing karaoke. Not just Japanese songs, but there were also some English and Chinese songs too (but both of us mainly just selected songs from our fav Japanese idols, heh.)
We also ordered some food (fried rice for me, spaghetti for my friend) that were delivered to our room.
Although most manga cafes offers free flow drinks from their vending machines, but this particular manga cafe also offers free flow soft-serve ice cream!! This is how we end up eating ice cream so early in the morning.
After spending 3 hours at the manga cafe, it's finally time to take a stroll along the sheltered shopping street near Sendai station.
We passed by a UFO catcher that has my husband's fav sheep character!!
And so, I gave it a try, since I gained abit more confidence after helping my friend catch her Tigger the previous evening.
After spending about 1500yen, I finally caught it!! Yey!!
Damn it's huge! Now I had to figure out how to carry this around for the rest of the trip. Haha.
We then took a short subway ride to Yaotome station, because the family name of 1 of the members in the group that we like (Hey! Say! JUMP) is "Yaotome". There's basically nothing much near this station other than residential area, so we just took some photos and then went back to Sendai station.
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| Member mascots for Yaotome Hikaru and Yabu Kota from Hey! Say! JUMP. |
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| Member mascot of Yaotome Hikaru at Yaotome station. We also managed to buy a station name keychain too. |
Returning back to Sendai station, we went shopping at Sendai Parco, which is just next to Sendai station.
There's also a Pokemon store here too.
Then, we walked around again, looking for lunch, as well as heading for a 2nd hand book store (Book-Off).
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| Lunch |
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| 2nd hand mag and books browsing at Book-Off |
There are actually many outlets for Book-off across Japan.
Japanese magazines that we usually get from Kinokuniya at Singapore are like SGD15-17.
But over here, I could get 2nd hand magazines between 100-600yen each (about SGD1.30-SGD8).
Not just jpop and idol magazines, I also like to browse japanese handicraft magazines too, which I also bought a few of during this trip.
Around late afternoon, we checked-in into our hotel room, and took a short rest before heading out to find dinner.
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| Katsudon from convenience store again. |
Some time in the middle of the night (close to 1am), while I was lying on the bed reading my ebook while trying to sleep, I felt my bed shake. Since I have encountered minor earthquake before during my previous Japan trips, so I know that this is an earthquake.
I checked jma website as well as switched on the tv, and sure enough, there's the earthquake alert.
From the magnitude, I figured that I don't really need to dash out of the building, so I monitored the website and tv for details for another 15mins or so, and then went back to try to sleep.
My friend apparently slept through the entire earthquake without knowing. -_-
