A trip to the ocean

Again, out of chronological order. This was on Wednesday, which is after the next entry.

Tuesday had been so crazy, so I decided I needed a break. After answering e-mails, I borrowed my father-in-law's bicycle and rode over to the junk/antique shop near downtown Kitami. It was jam-packed with interesting things. Some stuff was over-stock types of items, others were one-of-a-kind. I ended up buying a neck pillow for 105 yen, some Hello Kitty earwarmers for Dave Abbott and four small glasses (two Asahi and two Sapporo branded). Perhaps fortunately, I forgot my wallet, so I was limited to what I had in my coin purse.

As I was taking some pictures of the outside of the shop, I got a call from Masae asking if I wanted to go to the sea on a day trip. Akemi had asked if we wanted to do it the day before, but it was too wild. So I said yes. By the time we left, it would be late PDT, so I figured I could address anything later. I cycled home. When I was checking my e-mail, my brother-in-law, Doug called from Oaxaca Mexico using Skype (computer to computer). We talked for about ten minutes, and then I took a shower. The delay annoyed Akemi, and I should have told Doug, I had to go.

So, then we went to the ocean. Actually, the Sea of Okhotsk. I love that name. This is my second trip there. It is not far from Kitami. It only took an hour or so to get there. We stopped in Abashiri, a sea-side town and had lunch. Akemi took us to a Nepalese restaurant there. It was very good. We ate too much. Masae ordered a second Nan, which was the coup-de-grace.

The waitress had been in Japan only six months or so. Her Japanese seemed good, but she tried to ask me a some things in English, which wasn't so good. So we tried to talk in Japanese and English and communicated somewhat. It was the only time that mentioning the Mariners and Ichiro was met with a blank stare.

We asked them about driving around a kind of peninusula, and she got the cook, who said it was not a long drive. While he was out front, his cell phone rang and the ring tone was the bleating of a sheep. That was very funny.

Then we drove out to a beach. We stopped near a hotel that we stayed at on a previous trip. Then we continued on around the peninsula. After driving a while, we got to a lighthouse and stopped there. I took some pictures. When I got back to the car, Masae and Akemi wanted to go back the way we came because it was not clear how much more distance there was to make the loop. When I got back to Kitami, I check the map on-line and found out we had gone about half-way, but there was no way of knowing because the map we had did not appear to be to scale.

We stopped at a native garbage mound, where there was a little museum about the excavations and what they had found. There were skeletons, in addition to the broken pottery, fish shells, etc. that told how the natives had lived. The also had a more recent earthen house preserved.

It was getting late, and Masae and Akemi wanted to go the the Abashiri Prison museum. So we went there. It looked interesting, but it was kind of expensive, so we decided to go the Northern Peoples Museum, which was down the road. We only had about a half-hour or 45 minutes before closing time when we go there, but they held the museum open a bit later for us.

It was a really nice museum. There were artifacts from all over the north, Ainu (native sto Hokkaido), Russia and including the Pacific Northwest - Kwakiutl, Eskimo and others.

So that's about it. We were going to stop for some ice cream, but were saved the calories as the shop had closed for the day.

It was a nice contrast to Tuesday.