One night in Sendai (part II)

I woke up the next day at about 7:00 with a killer hangover. I decided to completely skip another communal bath, which boggled some of the other teacher's minds, but I needed some more time in on my futon.

I stumbled into breakfast with about 15 minutes before we were supposed to leave. I told some of the teachers how hungover I was, but they couldn't believe I had that much to drink last night. I wondered if they were just trying to be nice or if it had something to do with my face not turning red (sometimes at parties here people assume I'm not drunk because my face doesn't turn red (most Japanese people's faces turn red after one or two drinks). I told them I'd be ok and quickly scarfed down my crummy Japanese breakfast.

We checked out of the hotel and went on an hour long bus ride outside of Sendai to somewhere in Miyagi prefecture. We went to a temple that had one of the officially sanctioned "3 most beautiful views in Japan". As you may have guessed, nobody told me about this until we had long passed by the spot. I didn't even get the chance to take a picture of it with my cell phone. We did some more sightseeing around that area until we headed over to the port to await our ferry.

This is where the trip /really/ started to go downhill. I couldn't read the itinerary very well, so I had just assumed that the ferry was going off to some remote island or something to that extend. I sat through the hour boat ride while several of the teachers went outside to feed birds that were hovering around the ferry. When we disembarked on the ferry an hour later, I was surprised to see our tour bus waiting there to pick us up. It turned out that we weren't going anywhere; the ferry ride WAS the attraction. I felt like ripping my hair out.

The bus took us to a raw oyster restaraunt for lunch. Raw oysters are the one food I can't eat because of my blood disorder (they're potentially lethal) and I made the mistake of trying to explain this when the teachers kept asking me if I like raw oysters. They thought I was just being obstinate and kept trying to pressure me into trying the oysters. I finally got one of the English teachers at my school to explain the situation to them. They finally backed off and just made me drink a lot of beer instead.

The trip continue to go downhill after that. Our next destination: a factory that produces this spongy fish byrpoduct food for a 30 minute tour. Thankfully, I wasn't the only member of the group that was less than thrilled with this part of the tour, so I ditched with three other teachers to go play pachinko. I wasted about 1000 yen, but that was nothing compared to the 7000 yen the PE teacher spent in the same period of time. He actually hit the jackpot on one of the machines with about 1 minute left before we were supposed to leave. This caused us to be about 15 minutes late leaving the fish paste factory. He made it up to everyone by using his winnings to buy drinks for everyone.

We briefly went to one more shrine before heading back for home. I was more than ready to get home. I was actually thinking I could still get home early enough to go to a Thanksgiving dinner planned with some of the other JETs in the area. I should have predicted that a traffic accident in Tokyo would cause our 6 hour bus ride to turn into a 9 hour trip. I managed to stay sane by drinking myself into a coma and pestering my friends via texting. I got off the bus hoping to not see any of these people again for awhile

...unfortunately we had work the next day.