The bus station is below the train station in Sendai, conveniently located next to a large Yodobashi Kamera electronics store. After buying my bus ticket to Tokyo I went to cool off along the isle of air-conditioning units eager to show off how cool they could make me feel. As the circling sales clerks circled nearer I changed floors to the games.
A gleaming white Xbox 360 was on display with two controllers reaching alluringly towards me. I own an Xbox 360 but getting to play one whilst being far away from home, where mine was tucked under Yoko’s bed, was verging on heavenly. Nobody was around to bother me as I drove myself around some racing game or another. You might think that being on holiday, getting the chance to explore a city but spending the time in a shop starring at a screen was a heinous waste of time. But you’re wrong, it was great.
The best part of Sendai is this street.
It’s a really wide street with a tree-lined avenue running along its centre.
A number of statues stand in the middle facing each other like the last pieces in a mythic game of Chess. This is one of them.
Depending which way you approach this statue from you either get the back…
Or the front.
The trees make the avenue feel cooler than the rest of the city, and the filtered light through the leaves is calming. There are benches to rest and watch the cars go by: so close and yet unable to spoil the serenity.
On the same road is this distinctive building.
It is famous for its outer walls being made of so much glass, or something like that.
Inside is a library and some small galleries. I took the lift up to the free galleries and had a gander at some of the natural themed artworks on display.
The last one I went to was all about leaves and outside it was a desk where two elderly women sat. Their job, after much explanation, was to give people pieces of paper and scissors so that they could make their own leaves.
So it was that I found myself sitting in the art gallery at another desk cutting out leaf shapes. I hadn’t entirely understood what I was supposed to do but I was happy in my work and stayed there much longer than anyone else. After a while another visitor sat next to me and admired what I was doing, which was a sort of origami 3D vine.
When it was finished one of the women from the front desk came over and asked me if I wanted to keep my creation or whether it could go on the wall. I declined the chance to keep it and she led me to the wall of leaves where I discovered what I was supposed to have made.
Everyone else had drawn out a leaf shape, cut it out and coloured it in. Well, there were a few variations on the theme but none like mine.
I apologised politely for making something different but they were happy to have something else to go on the wall. They gave me a pin and let me choose the space for my vine to grow evermore (well until they throw them all out for the next exhibition). Bowing my way out I thanked them for my fun forty minutes and hit the outside heat again.
From that point on my day took a nose dive. I walked for what seemed like hours in the boiling air and blinding sunshine to get to the main art gallery, which was closed for renovation. Then I trudged to the castle ruins which were steep and little more than scattered rocks. Everywhere I tried to sit to eat my convenience store lunch seemed to be in the sunshine or next to people digging. I did find a quiet place at the foot of the castle where I sat on the most comfortable rock I could find and avoided the sun beams.
I went back to the library to use the Internet and moaned a bit to the lady who had been so angelic to me the day before. I felt a bit guilty afterwards.
About 3pm I headed back to Sendai main, over the bridge over the river when I saw a little path. The path led down to the river bank where there was grass to walk on for some way. I scampered off happily walking parallel to the river until I took a smaller path to the water’s edge where there were some flat rocks lying just above the water. I made my way to the one furthest into the water and sat.
This was my second favourite place in Sendai and I spent the best part of an hour just sitting, listening to the water, watching things flying and landing around me. At the precise moment I took this picture a plastic bag sailed into view. It wasn’t an American Beauty inspired moment of inanimate-object-becoming-animate art, it was just some rubbish that got in the shot.
Maybe I was catching Sendai at a bad time. Maybe it was in the middle of renovating itself, or perhaps it was because I wasn’t using the tourist buses that I was left feeling tired and bored.
I dusted myself off and went back to my hostel. On the way I listened to some music that I only listen to when I am feeling low, or need my energy back for an event. I probably only listen to it about three times a year, and have done for several years. The power of it is immense, I can feel it as a physical reaction within me. Perhaps that’s not surprising as blasting into my headphones it is as loud as thunder. It restored me as it always does, put a smile back on my face and made the world seem full of potential again.
In case you’re wondering what I was listening to. Wonder away.
Back in my hostel room was a Belgian man.
“Oh no,” I thought.
“Hello,” I said.
He was taking the opposite journey to me: South to North. He ran off a long list of places he had already been, showed me his guidebook with a map of Japan complete with circles for the cities he’d already conquered. He asked me for some advice on Hokkaido, I told him what I knew and then the conversation dried up.
He went out for some food. And later on so did I.
That night I was already under my futon and in the dark when he got back. He didn’t wake me up because I wasn’t asleep, but that was the only reason.
I did fall asleep at some point, and then woke again later to a deafening snore. My room mate was lying on his back, his stomach looking more immense now that it was horizontal, rising and falling like some great bellows to power his snore mouth.
I have heard loud snores before. In university I was woken up by the snore of a friend whose room was not next to mine, but opposite it. His snore was loud enough to go through two fire doors and wake me. He usually slept with the light on in his room, but that night The West Wing was on too.
It’s not an insult on The West Wing , I think he was just tired and being a city person he was used to falling asleep with noise around him. His snore had woken me up but The West Wing was keeping me awake. I knocked on his door to try and wake him, but my knock couldn’t compete with his snore. I called his phone and heard it ringing, but not as loudly as President Bartlet‘s phones.
We were living on the ground floor, and in the end I walked around to his slightly open window, managed to reach some oranges that were on his windowsill and throw them at him until he woke up. He was obviously confused: waking up to oranges flying towards him, and my arm and face at the window.
“Could you turn The West Wing off please, I can’t sleep”
“Ohhhhh, OK”
But in a hostel room in Sendai there were no oranges and no West Wing. There was only the Snore.
Trying to make the best of the situation I turned the Snore into a story.
“There once was a kingdom called HUCKSF where lived the beautiful princess FUHKFS who wanted to escape to KOSFH and slay the magical dragon JUSHF but her father the mighty HFUDAF used the magic of the crystal USCHG and the voice of the seamstress JFUAG to give his daughter the dream of PHOSFG
and so on.
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