Travel to learn, Learn to travel: Day 6 Asahikawa to Sendai

So today was basically a write off as I was in transport for most of the day. I caught a train leaving Asahikawa at 10am to Sapporo to Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto and then from there I believe I went straight to Sendai. I arrived in Sendai for 9:30pm...oh god thats a long day of train riding!

No wait I did one thing today!! I did a short trip to Otaru (music box town) again on my own this time to see some more shops that I had missed because I basically had 3 hrs to chill in Sapporo before catching my train.
(BTW, its about a 45 min local train ride to Otaru from Sapporo)

My travel route from Asahikawa to Sendai (thank god for Bullet trains!)

So I arrived in Otaru and I had about 1.5 hrs to kill. This time I got off the station before the last as it was closer to the shops and restaurants and as soon as I got to the music box museum I felt a deep longing for my friends. It was so weird, cause the last time I was there was with my three friends and as soon as I stepped back inside the shop just by myself I felt really sad they weren't with me and nostalgic. Anyway that ended quickly as I realised that there was much to do with very limited time!

So there was a point where I had like 45 mins to grab some food and head to the train station for 2:00pm. I was walking in the direction that I knew the train station was in and I saw this sweet sea food stall and decided to grab some squid legs. After I got it, I walked outside and immediately was disoriented. I thought I knew which way to turn so off I went and then I saw a store that I had passed earlier and was like wait a minute I must be heading the wrong way. I then turn around and start walking in the opposite direction and again, I see stores that I knew I had passed from earlier. Omg I cannot describe how fricken confused I was and I was starting to stress out because I now had like 20 mins to head back to the train station and I knew I was still pretty far from it. Finally I just gave up and had to ask someone where the station was. He pulled out google maps and pointed me in the correct direction. I caught the train with like 2 mins to spare. Ahh I felt so lucky when i sat down to just have caught the train. Because otherwise I would have missed my connecting train to Sendai :(

This was my reward for catching my train back to Saporro (Matcha Mochi ^^)

I finally arrived in Sendai, the train station was huge and bustling ( I really didn't know how big of a city Sendai was...) I really didn't know what to expect for Sendai so when I came into this, I was quite excited. The energy was high, people were dressed in suits scrambling to get home etc. I messaged my Buddhist monk couch surfer and he immediately found me in the middle of no where. I was impressed and could already tell this was gonna be a good experience (and yes I continued SC even with that horrid initial experience)

I was greeted by two other lovely girls, one from the U.S. and the other from France. Once we got in the car, Koodo took us to eat some vegetarian sushi, and boy was it ever delicious. It was like a legit Sushi restaurant too where you have the chef making the sushi in front of you and directly placing it on your piece of bamboo leaf !!The other girls knew a bit of Japanese so I was super impressed hearing them communicate with the sushi chef.

After dinner it was late, maybe around 11 and we headed back to the guest house called Sunshine House, and was it ever a sunshine house. It was basically our own little apartment. There was a triple bunk bed, a small kitchen with a stove, microwave, kettle, oven, fridge and dishwasher. Omg Koodo had taken the liberty of writing with permanent marker how to use everything. It was so funny walking into the bathooom and seeing a spray canister similar to a room freshener that was labelled "use after poo" LOL...I literally died when I saw that. So just picture like white appliances in the kitchen with black ink written all over it!!!

So after chatting with the girls and hearing how amazing Koodo was, which I could already see we eventually said our good nights and fell asleep