The next day was four seminars, and although I attended them all, Antoine and Nel skipped the afternoon ones to go check out the spooky theme park. I enjoyed almost all of the seminars, but was very tired when we met up later to go eat somewhere. We had lots of ideas, including one crazy idea to BBQ at my place, but we ended up going to Suma beach and watching the sunset, and then going to an izakaya that Nel often visits. That worked out great because they took credit cards – I could use some of the money that I had just sent home instead of burning cash. The place was great – the waitress was patient with our terrible Japanese, and there wasn’t a foreigner to be found.
On the way back I saw one of the girls from my yakitori on another train and we waved at each other. I think the guy she was with wasn’t too happy to see us waving madly at each other like giddy schoolkids. I guess I’ll let her handle that one.
Back in Sannomiya it was still early, so we went to Starbucks and just watched all the foreigners come and go, mixed in with the Japanese. Starbucks was next to a building full of hostess bars, so we’d see lots of salarymen go inside and come out later with a hostess to say goodbye. We talked about hostess bars for a while – it’s a concept that is so Japanese that we couldn’t really fathom it. Finally we went back a little early to the hotel and thankfully didn’t have any drunk guys on our train.
