Feelin' Crabby

Today was crab museum day.  (The post is rather behind because of Blogger's outage.  I'm having to catch up.)

It was my first time going it alone to a new place without Cale as a guide, and he gave me instructions for which bus to get on, but I am always bad at locations, so he also gave me his phone, which I could use to email him at work.  Armed with this, I went to the bus stop, got on the bus, and went far away from the city center.  I was a little worried, because I haven't ever really been too far in another country before without someone there.  Old Rowan would have been eating herself with anxiety, but Adventure Rowan went ahead with it anyway and got off the bus with no idea where she was going and smiled while she did it.  Okay, so I was still a bit concerned, but I figure some concern is healthy.

This is what a crab museum does not look like.

So after a pricey bus ride to a little stop that left me with no point of reference for where I was, I figured that the next part would be easy.   Surely, the Kanikouken, the crab museum, was one of the buildings with a bloody great crab on it.  I went to the first.  Then the next.  These were stores, warehouse sort of places, who knew what, but certainly not crab museums.  I looked at the map that had been near the bus stop.  I saw the kanji that Cale wrote down as the crab museum, and went the way I presumed that was.  No dice.

So when I saw a woman with a baby stroller, I figured maybe she could at least point me in the right direction.  I started to use my limited Japanese to ask her where, and she said "Oh, do you speak English?"

It turned out she's from California, visiting family, and that she would be happy to walk me up to the museum.  She was reluctant to leave me, since nobody else anywhere nearby would speak English, and she had spent our little walk essentially (very politely) asking me if I was out of my mind to come so far out into a place where nobody would speak my language.  I assured her I had my friend's phone and contact with him, and that I would be fine.  I hoped I would, anyway.

I went to see the crabs.  They were wonderful.  It was a tiny little museum/aquarium, but it had things, both crabs and other, that I have never seen before ever, not even on tv or in books.  There were these... things.  The baby ones were roughly tadpole sized, and the adults were sort of like half of an avocado.  They were tadpole-shaped, too, though they seemed do be some kind of fattish fish with a flat belly.  But then... the realization hits that they're sticking to things.  Because from the ones on the glass of the aquarium, you can see that their entire belly is a big suction...thing.  Not like a mouth sucker, because they seemed to have a separate mouth.   Because this place is for Japanese tourists, the signs were not bilingual and as such I couldn't really say what they were.  So I named them Horror Fish in lieu of a real name.  I wasn't disturbed by the small ones, but the big ones made me think of unpleasant alien things from science fiction.

They also had a couple of really big spider crabs in a tank and one of them seemed to be doing kind of a dance.

There were crabs in aquariums, and crabs in glass displays, and one crab that was some sort of big hermit crab, but his shell was pretty well engulfed by an anemone living on it, which made for a really odd-looking arrangement for both of them.

I was a little concerned about the bus, though, since Cale told me I should see signs posted with bus times, and I hadn't recalled any where I was let off.  If the bus only came once an hour, timing was kind of important.  I decided to see if I could find times, but I dawdled through the fish market next to the museum first, just to see.

This put me outside at the perfect time to meet my good Samaritan again.  A  horn honked and a car pulled up next to me.  She rolled down a back window, and said her mother, who was driving, would be happy to give me a lift back to the main station.  Heck yeah!

She and I chatted about Japan and where I was going and it was a really lovely little adventure.