As I suspected, there wasn’t any intarwebs at our friends place in Maebashi, so I’m trying to catch up. Day 44 was a travel day. I was going to visit friends in Toyama, but they had several deaths in their family so they were understandably too busy. I ended up going to Maebashi to visit other friends and to meet up with my mom. At first I was just going to hang out in Tokyo, but this was an interesting option as well.

I tried to take some pictures from the Shinkansen but you can imagine that a train going 170mph isn’t going to let you take very good pictures out the window.

Here’s a picture of the tea fields of Shizuoka Prefecture. It’s usually rice paddies out the window but Shizuoka is different.

Here’s a picture of Mount Fuji from Shizuoka.

As we got closer to Mount Fuji, it got cloudier.

Ah well.

So it’s ¥4,900 to take the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Maebashi. It only cost me ¥1,680 on regular trains. The travel time is only about ½ hour more, but there are more connections to the Shinkansen. The further I got from Tokyo, the quicker my iPhone battery died, so I took a screen shot of the directions on Google maps and made it my background wallpaper.

My mom wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 9:20PM, so we had some time to kill. The first place we went was Costco!

There are a few differences. The light bulbs in my local Costco are all fluorescents. Here I only saw LED light bulbs.

They had the same huge meat packs and chickens and even had pre-made paella. The bread here is actually bigger.

I didn’t see the pre-made sushi, but this woman had it in her cart.

For dinner we went to a shabu-shabu restaurant that my sister told me about in the past.

Here’s the appetizers.

A sashimi course.

Some more fish.

The meat is frozen and sliced thin right to order.

After slicing it goes right back into the freezer.

Here’s the shabu-shabu!

I tried some local saké as well.

After the main course, you can get udon or zosui.

I took a picture of the owner in her beautiful kimono. Her husband recently passed away and was a classmate of Mrs. Kobayashi’s so they chatted about classmates and Uniqlo.

My mom arrived at 9:40, 30 minutes later than the schedule we had, but she’s fine. And that’s day 44.