New Adventures

After my mountain hike, I needed a slow morning, so I did laundry and didn't make it out of the apartment until a bit later, and I tried to go to lunch at one of Cale's favorite cafes.  It was closed, and so was the other cafe he and his friends had been interested in.  The place we had been the night before was good but expensive, and so I wandered a while, got interestingly lost, came back, found a curry place I was pretty sure I couldn't order coherently in, and fell back on my standby of finding a bakery.  Curry-filled bread always hits a spot.  My mission of the day was finding the little folk crafts museum, which should be very close by.  I was pretty sure it was an area I had passed directly through.  Unfortunately, directions and maps in Japan are sort of an art.  Neighborhoods have names, but not all streets do.  Intersections of neighborhoods aren't uniform by any stretch of the imagination, and if what you know is that something exists at the corner of a neighborhood, it's a little tricky.   I'm pretty sure I passed the museum like six times.

A big sign would have been helpful.

I know that one of those times, I thought the building was interesting: I snapped a photo from across the street and moved on.  Downtown Tottori was not revealing its secrets to me, and I was getting frustrated, so I decided to go back to a spot by the train station where I found miraculous free wifi and look up the museum again on the Tottori tourism web site.  I looked at the picture of the museum, and stared.  I recognized it, because it was nearly identical to the picture I had taken earlier.  I flipped back through my camera to make sure.  All I had to do, then, was find the building I'd thought was so bloody interesting in the first place.

Shouldn't be hard, right?


I didn't wander in any more circles, but I know I didn't take the most direct route by a long shot.  Still, I found it, and I'm glad.  It was a little museum, but cheap to get into, and full of really lovely pottery and antique furniture.  I wish I had a magic translator, because the history is probably pretty cool.


Then I had a wonderful evening, where we took a bus out to Kappazushi, which is now officially my favorite sushi restaurant in the world.  Not only is it a conveyor belt sushi place, but if you make a special order, a little shinkansen train brings it out to you, and also, the plates are cheap.  Cheapest sushi I have eaten, but not like US cheap where you fear you might get food poisoning.  I will forever dream about Kappazushi.  Also, there is some weird sushi.  Like creamed corn.  And sushi that is little salisbury steaks.  So really, there can be no more complaints about us putting green chile in our rolls, or whatever - tradition is out the window, and that's fine.

I don't know what's going on with my expression.

Then we hit up my first purikura place – purikura are the photo booth pictures that are insanely decorated and customizable, and they put all US photo booths to shame.  The ones we went to also exaggerate your eyes and make them look a bit bigger, so we look almost like anime characters, especially Cale.  It's probably a good thing we don't have these at home, because everyone would be subjected to purikura with me pretty much all the time.


We topped off the night with German beer.  I know, I know, it's Japan, but Cale knows this great tiny German bar here and it's still international, so... hey, it's my vacation, I make the rules.   Besides, it's worth it to sit down and speak broken English with a cute bartender with oompah music and Japanese baseball making a really weird mix in the background.


I'm still behind - this was all two evenings ago - but all the stories will come along eventually!