48 Hours in SENDAI & YAMADERA TEMPLE: What to do & eat

48 Hours in SENDAI & YAMADERA TEMPLE: What to do & eat

Hey fellow explorers. In this episode, we’re in Sai, Japan. This is the biggest city north of Tokyo on the mainland of Japan. We’ll kick things off by taking Japan’s amazing highspeed rail, the Shin Kansen, from Tokyo to Sendai Station before diving straight into the local food scene. We’ll try everything from Zunda Shakes to delicious for dinner. We’ll catch the incredible fireworks that kick off the Tanabata Festival, and we’ll get caught in a little bit of a zombie horde trying to leave. Day two is an adventure as we’ll take a scenic train ride to climb the stunning Yamada Temple. It’s over 1,000 stairs to the top. Luckily, we had a little bit of rain to keep us cool. We’ll return to Sai to explore the incredible Tanabatada decorations back in the city and visit the historic Zui Hoden Mausoleum. We’re talking non-stop exploring. Stick around to see how we did it all and also everything we ate along the way. She is attired for this festival as you can see. Princess, are you ready to show them around? All right, let’s go. Oh, but before we headed out to Sai at the Ueno station, we tried the Gatchapon. Princess, what did you get? Ice. Ooh, and what color is it? Orange. Orange. 400 yen. This would be a good toy for the train ride. And these gatapons, the way they work is you just find these vending machines everywhere and you kind of like look and you’re like, do I want these cute things or do I want these cute things? They have prices. They always take hundred yen coins. And uh here at Weno Station, they said, “Hey, if you need change, go into New Day, which is the convenience store that they’re right in front of.” So to get to Sai, we took the Shin Consen from Ueno station to Sendai. This is the bullet train in Japan. 90 minutes on this train. And the bullet trains, if you’ve never taken them, are amazing. Super comfortable, super fast, and set up to eat. And in the train station, particularly Obano station, there’s a lot of places that sell beetles that are designed to eat on the train. What do I have here? I have a katu sandwich here cut into three tiny little pieces. Take a look at that. And a shrimp one that came with it. And then separately in a separate bag, I got this one, which is a pork katu sandwich because it has a panda on the front. And is that a I don’t know what that is. Looks maybe it’s a dog. I’m seeing something. There’s inside pork. Oh, and look, I found the egg. Sure enough, some runny egg yolk right on top of the pork. She’s got a custard danish and some grape juice. How is it, princess? And OC girl, she’s got some fried pork. Hers are on sticks. All right, the princess is eating a ki sandwich now. How is it? Good. Good. Fingerlicking good. All right. After a relaxing 90 minutes on the bullet train, we are here at Sennai Station. Now just to find our hotel which is connected in this massive station somewhere coming out of the Shinkansen gates. The first thing that we see right down here the Tanabata Festival. You can see all these different kind of like colorful displays. That’s what we’re here for. Our hotel is the Jara Hotel Metropolitan East which we think is out the east exit. Ah and I see a sign right there. So yes, this is the way. And just a short 2-minute walk from that shopping mall brings us to the entrance of the hotel. Nice. We didn’t even have to go outside. This is how I love it. Perfect Japan style. A hotel literally in the train station. The prettiest Japanese hotel I ever been at. All right, heading up the escalator. We can see there’s the decorations for the festival in here, too. And much as I suspected, we’re here too early. No rooms available until 3:00. Pretty typical for Japanese hotels. You can only check in at check-in time. So, we stored our luggage. We’re going to go explore the city. We’re going to be back in 3 hours. All right. So, heading out to Sai Station. We got the one of the most popular dishes in Sai or popular desserts in Sai. We’ve got this little ice cream here. And we’ve got this little shake right here. This is Zunda, which is basically like this is mashed edamame or soybeans. Okay, we got a shake right here. Give the shake a try. Yeah. Thumbs up. All right. Do you want to you like the shake more than the ice cream? You like the shake? Okay. You like the shake? It’s very pleasant. And I like the mass soybean. There’s a little bit of moji in there too on the inside. I like this much better than actually anamame that you get like sushi restaurant. That was funny. The curious princess. She really liked that uh shaking until she heard me say it was edamame. But now that it’s empty, what do we do with the trash? There’s no trash cans around here. This is a problem in Japan. So, what uh often you do and what I saw other people do was bringing their trash right back to a store and handing it to them, taking it away cuz they’ve got trash cans for the things they sell. Pretty typical. Now, this station, like every good train station in Japan, has a really good tourist information where we stopped in to pick up some pamphlets about the festival that we’re here for, maps, and that they even even had some free fans to beat. And the festival starts just outside the train station where there’s all these extra food stalls set up. Uh, and you can even get beer out here in front of the station because in Japan, it’s completely legal to get beer and drink it while you walk around on the streets. When I said walk around on the streets, I mean walk around on the sidewalk. Just because you drank beer doesn’t mean you can walk on the street. Remember that. So, just about two blocks from the central gate of the JR Sai station is their main covered shopping street. This is one of the biggest covered shopping arcades in all of Japan. And this is going to be home to the Tanabata Festival starting tomorrow. You can see all these things hanging hanging from the roof. Tomorrow there’s going to be more pretty things hanging from the roof. In addition to shops, there’s a lot of cool restaurants on this street and cool place to take selfies inside of a fishcake with a fan. And the curious princess, she was a little hungry for something sweet after the mama ice cream. We wanted to redeem that. So, we stopped at Marian Crepes for a peach vanilla ice cream and whipped cream crepe. All right. So, as the princess is eating her crepe in front of the crepe shop, we saw right back there at Doniote. There’s this guy out here. He’s yelling, “What’s he trying to sell?” He’s trying to sell these cooling body wipes. Actually, he’s got a cooling body mist, but OC girl really hot. It’s like 100° Fahrenheit today or 36 or 38° C. I don’t know. So, we’re hoping these are going to work. You can see I am quite warm. So, this says you open it up and you just wipe it on your skin and it makes you feel cool. The princess is stood up now because she’s like, “What’s this going to do? Is it really going to make you feel cool? For me, some parts that I missed. Okay, thank you. It has a lot of alcohol in it. And I think if the alcohol dries, it’ll make you feel cold. The curious princess would not enjoy this feeling at all, I think. But it’s like first it goes from like hot to burning. And after that, now now I do actually legitimately feel cool. My face actually feels cold now, but I don’t think a 5-year-old would want to go through that transformation. It’s a very weird sensation on my face. I would like to find a swimming pool to jump in at the moment. All right, so Princess, what’s the verdict on those Gatsby cooling body wipes? Thumbs down. Yeah, thumbs down. And as we walk further down the covered shopping street, we can see some of those things lifting up, getting heaved. Oh, by like a big team of people down there. And we figured out we could get around the crowd by passing through this little small supermarket here. But as we did, we noticed these watermelons. These watermelons are $5,400 yen. That’s about $40 for that watermelon. Hope it’s tasty. Do you want a $40 watermelon, princess? I bet you do. So, as we’re walking along this street, we saw a Starbucks. Um, and we didn’t go in for pop. They found a sign back here that says craft peach tea. And OC girl said she’s never seen craft peach tea from Starbucks. So, we had to go in and get one. 700 yen for the biggest size. The venty right here. It’s got some peach puree at the bottom, some tea on top, served with a big like kind of bulb straw. [Music] Plus, it tastes mostly peach. Try to get some tea. Very peachy concoction. By the way, the desserts at Starbucks in Japan, so much better than the desserts at Starbucks in the USA. USA Starbucks, what gives? Why can’t we get some of these desserts? All right, so after our PGT, we did some more shopping. We found this store that has kids yucatas and jinbees. How’s that going to look on the Curious Princess? I think we’ll see pretty soon. And Price is right, 2,750. And this store doesn’t just have kids ones. If you’re an adult and you’re looking for a yucata or a kimono, this is the spot. Oh, and just to clear up an elephant in the room, I know at some point somebody’s going to mention about my socks and sandals, but you know what? The kimono wearing ladies in the store, they wear socks with sandals because here they actually sell socks that have little split toe right here that are made to go in these sandals. Now, I know my Costco Kirtland brand gigantic socks aren’t as cool as those kimono sandal socks, but uh they’re about the only thing that fit on my gigantic size 14 feet. Yeah. How you doing? Oh, yeah. Curious Princess. She lost her tooth just a couple days ago in our whole Tokyo 7day vlog. That’ll be out just after this one. So, make sure to check out our 7 days in Tokyo that we did before our two days here in They’ve also got these kind of socks for sandals or for shoes. If you just want like a half sock for your heel, they’ve got those, too. And just to show you where this all is on the map, here is JR Sai Station. Our hotel that we’re staying at is here. And this is the shopping street. All right, we walked back to Sai Station because it’s almost time to check into the hotel. We got about 20 more minutes. Not quite. So, we’re going to go inside one of our favorite stores in all of Japan. Loft right here. Is it because it’s yellow that it’s our favorite? No. It’s in fact got really cool stuff inside, too. Is a small It’s a Creative Life store. So, they have just like all cool Japan stuff all under one roof. Oh, and I stand corrected. This one’s actually a pretty big one. Three floors. Two, three, and four. I was going to come and look at their selection of watches here. I mean, if you’re looking for a yellow Casio Pac-Man watch, you’ve come to the right place. Their stationary section is also quite impressive. And for many of the pens, they’ve actually got samples that you can try right in the store. 400 p.m. We finally got into our room. There was a little bit of a line to check in, but we are here. This is the Superior Triple Room, and I’m just going to give you a quick tour of it. There will be a full hotel review of this later. It was about $230 a night, $250 a night for this room. US dollars, uh, three beds in it, so perfect for the three of us. There’s one bed that’s different than the others. And come over here. When we checked in, they even gave her little bear slippers. Isn’t that cute? Uh, nice view outside into Sendai. We are up here on the eighth floor. And then let’s just do a quick tour of the bathroom because it’s pretty nice in here. Pretty big bathroom for Japan standards. We have a uh shower and a tub that’s over here with like this thing has like jets on it like this. A handheld and a rainheld. So, I’m looking forward to taking a shower. It’s got a big sink over here with all the amenities you could ever need. And then finally over here, it’s got one of these fancy totoilets. The Oh, that opens by itself and it washes, dries, deodorizes, and maybe even sings you a song. Okay, it doesn’t do that last one, but it definitely does wash your bottom if you so desire. It’s 5:00, which means it’s dinner time. And Sai is famous for another food item. They’re famous for cow tongue or Qon. We made a reservation for this restaurant cuz we heard it’s really good. It is up on the fifth floor of this building, which you go in an elevator down this kind of sketchy hallway. And I sure hope this place is good. All right, so the place does look pretty promising. We got the set meal here that comes with 10 pieces of Utah, the cow tongue that they grill over charcoal. Uh the 10 piece set that come with rice and soup is 2,950 yen. Some biru to go with it, too. Oo. Good on a hot day. The gutton also comes with little pickled veggies here on the side. But let’s go ahead and give this a go. It’s scored to make it easy to eat and soft. So, guton, which is the tongue of the cow, most people think is really kind of tough, but actually the way they do it here in Sai makes it really quite tender and juicy. My first time having it here, but there’s a whole, they call it like uton street at the train station where there’s a ton of restaurants. So, let’s give this a go. More chewy than typical beef, but a really good, a strong, rich, meaty taste. If you like cow beef and you want to amp it up a notch, definitely have some gutton while you’re in saiya. And yes, the princess got a piece and she likes it too. Particularly the gutton that’s in the soup cuz that one is quite tender. All right. Now, although the gut looked pretty small, it was quite filling. And you might be thinking, Chris, kowang guton weird. You know what? I said the same thing before I came to Sai and then I came here and then I had the gut and absolutely fell in love. So, we might do the same. Give it a try. If you’re looking for your Ghuton fix and you’re not coming to Sai and you’re in Southern California at the Mitsua in coast of Mesa, there is, as far as I know, the only restaurant in the USA that specializ in Utah. It is a restaurant from Sai that has an outpost in Southern California. And it’s it’s legit. And uh now that it’s almost 5:00, if we look at the shopping street, there’s uh some of the things hanging up here. Now, to tell you how big is in Sai inside Family Mart, the convenience store right here, they have salami made of Guuton Cow. And then over here, they’ve got brazed that comes with a fork. And uh what’s this? Jerky. And the princess, what’s she going to get? She’s going to get these panda milk biscuits. That’s not cute, huh? Now, back at Sai Station on our way back to the hotel to kind of freshen up for a moment, I found the most unique escalator. Little things like this excite me. But this escalator, it goes up for a little bit and then it goes flat before it goes back up again. I’ve never been on an escalator like that anywhere before. All right, so it is 8:00 and where are we right now? We are in a park in Sai. the curious princess. She is getting tired, but we are walking in the biggest mob of people walking in one direction that I have ever been in. This is the like introductory fireworks for the Tanabata Festival and it’s at this park and I feel like we’re here with about a million people. Many of them wearing their yucatas and their formal Japanese attire but walking like zombies. thoughts of Japanese police yelling at us about where to go and what to do. The fireworks show lasts an hour long. We’re about halfway in and it kind of has a lot of start and stops. So, we’ve we’ve given up on it now. We’re going back to try to avoid the rush, but clearly we haven’t because the rush is is impressive. Let me turn the camera around so you can see. Good morning. It’s day number two from Sai. What are we having for breakfast? We’re having some cakes that we got downstairs at one of the French Japanese bakeries in the train station. Chature. Very nice. When they package it, they even give you like ice with it. They say don’t eat. So, we’ve got a few cakes. Some for today, breakfast, some for dessert later. Princess, how’s your cake this morning? Good. Good. Today is also a little bit of a rainy day as we can see out of our window. So, looks like we’re going to take our umbrellas with us as we head out. All right, so after finishing breakfast, we are out in the train station on the second floor of Sai Street station in front of New Days. They have these gashapons that curious Princess going to get one of these to play with on our train ride that we’re going to be taking in just a moment. There you go. We are taking the 912 rapid train to Yamagata. We’re going to find that on track number seven. Now, people always ask me, Chris, how do you find your trains in Japan? Is it easy to find? Are things signed in different languages? And in the big touristy hubs, like Sai, for example, in this big train station, you will see everything is signed in English and Japanese. I will say the English comprehension in Sai is not as good as in Tokyo because there are absolutely less foreign tourists here. uh and it’ll probably fall off as we start to get out of Sai into the rural areas. So just uh be prepared with a little Japanese knowledge if you’re going out into the countryside. Taxi drivers too um not can speak the best English. Yesterday we had to use Google Translate with the taxi driver to get us to the fireworks. And the taxi driver, he was really concerned wouldn’t be able to get us to where the fireworks are. He couldn’t get so close. So we used Google Translate back and forth to help us actually say, “Well, he’s going to try to get us close, but he won’t be able to get us there.” All right, makes sense. We are now in the train platform waiting for a train. We won’t wait in orderly lines over here like this. And the princess wants to be wants to say something. What do you want to say, princess? Yeah, she wants to say that she This is the outfit that she got yesterday on the shopping street. And Papa wants to say that it is very hot here in August. Hot and humid. 9:12 right on time. We’re in the garden. We hear his friends snacking. We got these little hammer crackers. That holiday princess. And which one did the princess get? She got the purple one. Let’s figure what she’s going to put in there later. After an hour on the train, we arrived at Yamadera station. It gets much colder here than in Sai. They’ve actually got these little houses in here. They even wait on the tracks to stay warm. And where we’re going on the temple is up there. Ooh, raining a little bit. So, this sign has English on it, but uh we’re curious on this. The English says roundtrip time, but OCR seems to think the Japanese says one way. So, it’s either an hour all the way up to the top or an hour round trip. Um, I guess we’re going to find out. And on our way out of the station, we noticed on this billboard here, they had a sign that say, “Beware of monkeys and don’t take pictures of them.” I’ve seen pictures of monkeys holding cameras that they’ve barely stolen from people. And this is a pretty low tech station. There’s no like wickets or ticket gates. There’s just this little thing here that you tap your IC card right there. All right, that’s good. 858 yen. It’s what our 1-hour train ride cost. And uh going past the ticket gate, what do we see here? The roundtrip time in Japanese uh is 2 hours. Now, it’s also important in these rural areas to pay attention to the train times coming back here. They’re roughly once hourly. We’re going to try to get back for the 1221 or the 109 trains. My pro tip is to take a picture of these so you can refer to it later. People always ask me about this. This station does have restrooms and it has train lockers. How big are they? Actually pretty big train lockers at this one. Another option if these are full or you can’t use these is there’s a shop just to the left of the station that you can leave your luggage at. Obviously, you’re going to have to pay for it, but you can store it here, too. And the train station building itself is pretty unique. It was on some list of like top 100 most unique train stations in Japan. And it’s also got an old school Japanese mailbox right next to it. So, pick up a postcard and uh mail it back to yourself. That’s always something fun to do. They pick up uh once a day. The shops here really cute. This one specializes in junk antiques. You know what they say about antiques. One person’s junk is someone else’s antique. Now, the walk from the town to the temple is filled full of lots of restaurants and shops and a few other staircases that look like you can go up. But after 10 minutes, you’ll find this staircase, which is the one that you want to go up. It also has a sign right here that tells you where the start of the mountain trail is. Now, at the top of that staircase is the first shrine, and there’s many more along the way, and also a spot right here where people are leaving their offerings on their way up. Now, if you’re hungry on the way up the walk, don’t worry. And there’s actually plenty of little cafes like this that you can get drinks and something to snack on and even sit outside if it was a sunny day. A little further up the trail, they’ve got a statue of this famous poet here who wrote some of the most famous poetry about this place. And after you make an offering at one of these shrines, you can ring the gong or the bell. And this one right here, this is the happiness bell. All right. So, just for time keeping purposes, there’s no way we’re going to make it 2 hours round trip because we’re in 40 minutes and we are from the train station took us 40 minutes to get here. I mean, but this time what most people are going to do, you’re going to stop, you’re going to take some photos. So, now 2 hours probably 4 hours if you’re taking a leisurely round trip. And this spot, it’s an important milestone on the journey because this is where you pay admission to go up. 500 yen per adult, 200 yen per child. And then you’re actually in the temple. By the way, Yamada Temple officially means mountain temple. That is why there’s such a climb to get up here. And now with this little rain going up, we could easily think, ah, it’s kind of a drag that it’s rainy. But I actually feel like this sort of weather is the perfect Japan temple weather, like kind of moody, kind of misty. You get the moss and the green, and then you get sections like where we are right now with all these trees up ahead that you don’t even need their umbrella. Yeah. Yeah. Look at that. Mhm. still holding my Well, she’s still holding her umbrella cuz she likes it. A little further on the way up, what do we find on this shrine on Dormon hanging up on the top? It’s one of the Curious Princess’s favorite Japanese cartoon characters. All right. And this sign at this point says, “We’ve gone 360 steps and there’s 640 more to go to the inner spot.” And often a distinct sound you hear in forest in Japan and at this one too and it’s loud right now is this cuz there’s actually like a cicada in this tree right here. It’s really Can you make a cicada sound? Very good. So about an hour and 20 minutes into our total journey. We’re now at this sign. 740 done. 260 to go. And from here is where you get really beautiful views down back on that steep staircase. that way. You can choose a couple different ways to split. There’s a shrine over in that direction or the main route up there. This is though where I really start to question my physical fitness because we are we are huffing and puffing and there are some grandmas and grandpas on this trail that are having a way easier time than we are. I just hope I can do this when I’m their age. I also saw some people on this walk wearing dress shoes, which that seemed like all of a bad idea. Really quite slippery. Where’s Where’s some good shoes with some good traction on this? At 840, we have another milestone. A shop up here where you can get drinks and restrooms. Oh, this is kind of cool. Up at this place about 900 steps in, there’s a post office. So, don’t mail your postcard at the bottom. Mail your postcard at the top. This mailbox, they only pick up on weekdays. All right, so just about 90 minutes into the full journey. Here we go at the Oku no in. This is where the big dybatu is inside. They say no videos inside, so you’ll have to come up and see that big golden Buddha yourself. They said 40 to 60 minutes. We took 90. We also have a 5-year-old. Uh so I’m pretty pretty proud of ourselves. Pretty great views looking down here like that. And just a great place to admire the peacefulness of this mountain temple and amazed at how they built this thing so many hundreds of years ago. And up on top here, just like you saw on the map before, there’s a whole bunch more to explore. You can choose from this point to go down the way you came or to stay on top and explore some of the other shrines. We have a train to catch and it’s almost lunchtime, so we’re going to head down, which hopefully should take less time. And on the way down, the rain and the haze started to clear out and we get that beautiful view into the valley down below. And also the beautiful view of sweat on my forehead. And if you wonder how they get those souvenirs up to the shops up there, here we go. of delivery going up those stairs. There are no roads to get up there. Just on people’s backs and right past the delivery guy was the postman going up to that mailbox. That’s a walk. Speaking of people being physically fit, this guy who’s the delivery guy that we saw going up Yamamato Transport, that’s the same one that we had deliver when we were in Tokyo. And uh he has gone up and down in the time that we’ve just been going down. I wish I can be as fit as he is. [Music] All right. So, from the top to get back down to where we paid for tickets took us about 30 minutes. And now we’re going to find some food. Yeah, I’m hungry. And here you get another view of the town down below with the train station just right here. We’ve got about an hour before we need to catch our train. And it’s funny, the English translation for the town around here is Temple Town. Although looking for some place to eat is easier said than done. Many of these restaurants apparently open on weekends only. So, let’s try to find one that’s open. Okay, we use the magic of Google Maps, search for restaurants, and open now to find this spot, which we can see somebody’s going in. So, it’s open. So, this restaurant, like most of the restaurants in the area, specialize in soba, a buckwheat noodle. Here we have the cold buckwheat noodle served with tempura. It comes with these little okuchima on the side. Some seaweed, some pickled veggies. You get this the sauce that you pour into this bowl and then you could add some things and you dip the noodles into Oh, the curious princess. Oh, I thought she was going to give me some seaweed. She’s actually eating it cuz she really likes it. But, you know, you kind of put these things in here and then you can then dip your noodles into there. And then you can eat your very chewy, springy, refreshing, cold noodles on a hot day like today. And we have this cool tatami mat seating area that we’re in. This place closed at 400 p.m. as do most the place in this town. This is definitely a lunch kind of place. And the Curious Princess over here, she has, if you prefer your noodles hot, you can get them hot as well. Hers are in soup. Couple pieces to pour in there. And they gave it to her with a kitty bowl and a fork, which if you need to say fork in Japanese, you say fu. That’s your Japanese word for the day. Now you know. To drink, they have this barley tea. Oo, the curious princess. We got water to get that. We said misu. That’s your second Japanese order of the day. Misu. And there’s barley tea. Unlimited refills in a little pot right over here in the zojerusi. You just bring the cup over and you go. All right. So, our post noodle assessment really quite good. We would absolutely eat there again. The cold noodles. OC girl, she loves sobba and she’s like, “This is really good soba.” The curious princess loved her hot noodles as well. They make their own soba in there. They got like a window out in the front where you can see it. Note, they do not take credit cards there. No Visa, no Mastercard. Uh they take SUA, so if you loaded up a bunch of money on that, you could do it. They take Line Pay. Um but uh that was definitely a that was definitely a catch cash purchase. All right, we got 19 minutes before we get to the train. So, we’re going to do that. Oh, I’m in good company with cameras here. There is someone with a very big camera right there. As of course, the Curious Princess walkhead to the train. Okay, we’ve got 3 minutes before our train gets here. We decided to hydrate up a little bit. We love the Japanese vending machines. What do we get? Show the front of this to the camera. It is a mango drink right here. I got a green tea and OC girl got some coffee. All from the same vending machine. And all really cold. All really cheap prices like 150 yen. So like about $1 each. And this one is [Music] all right. And as the train pulls into the station, the next Japanese word to know is Mamaku. Now arriving on the on the other side. I guess we’re getting on another. But it turns out that one’s not our train. That one’s on track two. Both trains arrive and depart here at this station at the same time. It’s like a one track system in this area. So in order for the trains to pass, they both get to the station. So when you’re going back to Sai, if you’re doing this, make sure you get on the one that comes on track one back to Sai. Don’t Don’t get on that one unless you’re going to wherever that goes on track two. And now arriving on platform one, our train. And you can see on the front right there. It goes by pretty quick, but it says that’s bound for Sundai. All right. And 109 right on time. Depart from the station on both trains in two different directions. How’s the mango drink? All right. After an hour on the train, we are now back at Sendai Station. We’ll go ahead and tap out. 858 yen. Uh, and we’re going to go visit Yodbashi Sai now. It is the big electronics chain in Japan. They have a big outlet here just right next to the station. This store is the best electronic store I’ve ever been to. This right here, this is a high-tech vacuum. Isn’t that cute? And the vacuum’s name is Hoba. What I love about this store is not just a cool Japanese product, but the wide variety of them and in every different color. like what color of hair dryer would you like? As a YouTuber, I particularly like their wide variety of camera gear, particularly tripods, because it’s not just that they sell a lot of tripods, but they’ve also got them all set up. So, you can look at them, you can lift them, you can play with them, you can bring the legs up and see if you actually really want to buy it or not. Or if you’re in the market for noise cancelling headphones, you can try on every one that Sony has ever made. And by the way, these right here, these are the current ones that I travel with, the WH100XM6. And although it’s electronic store, it’s not just limited to electronics. Like, if you want a water bottle, this is the gigantic aisle of water bottles. It is just crazy the like variety in the sheer amount of products they have in this store. Maybe maybe you want to shave ice. Make some shave ice at home. Look at all these different shave ice machines. And I have no idea how I would bring any of these gaming chairs home. But that doesn’t stop me from looking at them. Have you ever seen such a wide variety of video gaming chairs? The prince’s favorite part? Definitely the video game section with me and Mario coming out of his pipe and uh all the fake the fake food here. This is a big thing in Japan. Fake food. You know, they have these replicas of food in the windows, but then they have a whole industry that makes it as like keychains and various things. like maybe you want a corn refrigerator magnet. So after our electronic shopping, we took the subway two stops from Sai Station to start a covered shopping street from a different section of it. This is the beginning of the Tanabata Festival decorations, but this is it’s not covered here. And so cuz it’s not covered, they’ve actually had to cover the decorations. kind of look funny. At the entrance to the festival, this kind of security guard right here has a sign that says precaution against heat stroke. And he’s also got a really cool vest that has fans in it to keep him cool. See that black thing down at the bottom? Yeah, that’s a fan that blows air around his vest. Oh, and in this part of the street, it’s really interesting how they hang these since they don’t have a cover to hang it from. It’s actually like gigantic pieces of bamboo. Wow. And because all tanabata viewing is better with food, the curious princess got a strawberry gelato to enjoy. Yeah. And this is all pretty low tech how they hang these things. I mean, we saw some yesterday. Here’s another guy wearing a dress shirt and a tie on a rickety ladder uh adjusting the strings that like hold these things in place. And the uh decorations are made or at least sponsored by the shops that are along the street. So, the Zunda Zunda Cafe, all of them are green, just like Edamame. And in front of the Gyoza restaurant, they’ve got some Guyoza decorations. Well, they don’t they don’t look like gyoza, but they say gyoza. Oh, and on this street is a branch of my favorite tayyaki chain in Japan. They make these like waffle fish that have fillings in them. And you know what? They’re cheaper here in Sai than in Tokyo. They are 380 in Tokyo, but they’re like 100 yen cheaper here. And while the curious princess finishes her ice cream cone for OC girl and I, we got this strawberry shave ice. 500 yen. And you can put as much condensed milk on as you want. Strawberry. And now as we enter the actual covered shopping arcade, we can see them in their full glory or full splendor without the requisite bags on top. But that sign says beware of heat stroke. Walking down that street, Curious Princess found a store. She was really interested in a store fully dedicated to Gashon. Okay. And now, like any candy store, she’s trying to pick out which one she wants, but she can only choose one. Which one is it going to be? And the Curious Princess chooses this one. And at the intersection of one covered shopping street to the other, this seems to be like the festival central plaza cuz all the news crews are here. Right above is this chandelier of hundreds of origami paper cranes. So, what the sign here says about these paper cranes is they’re actually made by the elementary school students. It was started 15 years ago with the big earthquake and there are 78,000 of them. Wow. And it’s clearly newsworthy cuz we see the news crew here ready to go live. And really to show you how all the stores get in on the act, even McDonald’s right here puts up theirs with the golden arches. [Music] And then just past those McDonald’s, we’ve got a festival band here doing a parade down the street. I love their attire. And now this little part of Sai is like their equivalent of Golden Guy. It’s the district of all these little bars. So, if you’re looking for a cute and quaint place to go drinking, check out these spots. Many of them only seat like five to 10 people. Look at that. Pretty small and cozy on the inside. Now, lots of the restaurants have special food just for the festival. One of the most unique ones is at Coco Curry Ichibana that specializes in Japanese curry. Their festival food are Mexican churros, which the uh Southern California boy here. I think I’m going to pass on the churros. Now, if they were cur flavored churros, that’d be something. So, for dinner, we stumbled across a yakuri spot on that main covered shopping street. Uh you order off a QR code that you scan on the table and then they make meat grilled on sticks, which you can’t go wrong. We saw them grilling it from the sidewalk. But you know we’re in sandai because they’ve also got. What’s pretty unique too is they’ve got this little thing that they put at the side of the table. This thermos. I thought it was water and then I saw it was hot and I’m like, “Oh, that’s not water.” It’s actually soup. Soup. A really strong peppery chicken soup that’s quite tasty. They No, she says it’s not very good. Too peppery. They also charge a 300 yen cover charge to sit down here. Uh, but the drinks for elementary school children are discounted. Only 100 yen for her Kalpus. And OCR, what’s she drinking? She’s got a peach sour right here. And because it’s an alcohol that you can’t really tell is alcohol cuz it doesn’t taste like it. They put this in it to make sure you know alcohol. Alcohol is that some of the meats here. This is an interesting one. This is ginger wrapped in pork. Really quite a strong flavor with this one. Hot right off her throat. Oh, she does not like the soup. This one right here looks like a lollipop, but it’s not. This is miso flavored pork rolled with seaweed. What is with you telling people you don’t like the soup? She likes the calc. That was a good deal. So, after dinner, we took a taxi to the Zooi Hoden. This is a very grand mausoleum that’s right there in the back of me right now. This usually only open in the daytime, but during the Tanabata Festival. They open it up at night cuz they add some special decorations and they add some special lights and really impressively elaborate. So, the original building dates back to the 1600s, but it was destroyed in World War II, rebuilt in 1979. Really quite elaborate. Reminds me of the elaborate buildings in Nico. And visiting here is also quite a stair climb, too. So, make sure you got good climbing legs when you visit. After fully exploring the grounds on our way out, we found a Japanese folk performance. We were serenated by some very calming music. And you know what time it is now. It makes it bedtime. We’re going to have a taxi back to the hotel, get a good night’s sleep, and see you in the morning. All right. So, today we’re going to be heading to Tokyo Disney just for one night and then on to another hotel in Tokyo and so that we don’t have to carry all of our luggage around with us to all these places. So, we checked them in at Yamamoto Transport and they will be in our hotel in Tokyo in 2 days. So, we’ve got just a backpack to take with us on our way to Tokyo. Total price 3,978 yen. So, like $30 to ship those two suitcases all the way to Tokyo. Pretty good deal. Oh, and if you’re if you need to store luggage here in Sai, they have cloak room service here for 800 yen a day if you just want to store your bags there, too. All right. Are you ready for sleep? We just got up. All right, let’s go see Sundai before our train at 1. If you’re looking for this luggage counter, you will find it on the second floor of the main JR station. There’s also some coin lockers right next to it. And if you like cream puffs, Beard Papa makes pretty good cream puffs when they’re open. We came back to the shopping street that’s close to the train station. It’s part of the big covered shopping complex, but we didn’t make this part yesterday, so to admire the big decorations up here. It’s a little before 10:00 a.m., so none of the shops are really open yet. Pretty much most of the shops here at Sai or at least on this street don’t open until 10:00 and the restaurants don’t open till a little bit later. But there are tons of people here already because they’re all here to admire the festival. And everybody’s dressed up in their festival finest, even the doggies. A Oh, and we didn’t do it. But just right up here is the Nom Nom Cat Cafe or Cat Lounge where you can go in and drink coffee and play with cats. All right. And right in front of the Tito GameStation Arcade is my favorite decorations because they have the Space Invaders characters on them. Look at that right there. Here we go. That’s it. That’s the 8bit music from Space Invaders. But apparently I don’t have the same taste that the event organizers do. The game station didn’t win any awards, but this one did. Where are my favorite video game characters though? H. And this blue one right here. This one won the bronze medal. Oh, by the way, something I’ve noticed is that uh they’re all actually everywhere held up by bamboo. Even here where it’s inside bamboo right at the top. And the guys with the signs out there to say don’t get too hot. They’re back again today, too. 10:00 a.m. They start to come out in Yodashi. Yesterday, we saw a robot vacuum. Here we see a robot wearing some typical Japanese attire. There’s the Curious Princess meeting the Soft Bank mobile robot. It’s a cell phone provider. It’s just about 11:00 a.m. now and the streets getting really quite busy, but this is cool. In amongst all these shops, right here is a little shrine and if you go down there, you can see that shrine at the end. So, you really got to pay attention to all the attractions on this street. And here we even see Starbucks getting in on the action. And you can see the little Starbucks coffee cups right here. Starbucks logo. All right, so we decided to come back to the train station for lunch cuz the restaurants here look a little less busy. But uh we saw this vending machine here, Zunda Shake. These edamame shakes are literally everywhere in Sai, even in the vending machines. And they’re really like seasonal things in Japan, too. So in this bakery in Sai Station, everything is peach flavored because it’s the juicy peach summer. But that proved to be an error in judgment because these places in the train station are in fact busier than the ones outside. We did find one that does bento. So we’re going to eat that in the hotel room. The prices on these bento boxes depend on how many pieces of meat that you get and whether you get the regular meat or the premium meat. So we got one of each. All right. So we’re back in the room now. This is the 10piece premium gutton set. And those kind of like sides that we saw before with the pickled veggies and the spicy sauce, those are all wrapped nicely in these little um plastics here. For the curious princess, we got her a kids curry that they had on top of rice. She’s given that one a thumbs up. So, let’s go ahead and give this a try. Nice big thick premium piece of guton right there. How does it compare to yesterday? That’s the question. I think the taste is pretty similar, but this one’s pretty good that it’s packed in a box like this to go. You could easily take this and eat it on the bullet train back to Tokyo. All right, so now that our bellies are full, we’re down at the Shinkansen tracks. We are taking the 1257 train right there to Tokyo because we’re heading to where, princess? Tokyo Disney. Tokyo Disney. There’s our train, the 1257 Hayabusa to Tokyo. 17 cars. That’s a big train. After the curious princess and I left on the train, Oigirl stuck around Sai for another day to enjoy more of the Tanabata festival. One of the things she got to see was the actual festival dance. You know, not just the band that we saw going down the street, but lots of people all parading down doing a traditional Japanese performance. Neat. If you want to see that adventure, the seven days that we spend in Tokyo, as soon as that video series is done, we’ll put it up on here in the screen. But in the meantime, you can check out more of our Japan videos. You’ll find links to those and others in our Full Japan playlist.

Join us for an incredible 48-hour adventure in Sendai, the vibrant capital of Miyagi Prefecture, and a breathtaking day trip to the iconic Yamadera Temple in Yamagata! If you’re planning a trip to the Tohoku region of Japan, this vlog is your perfect guide to the best sights, activities, and, of course, the most delicious food.

In this video, we’ll take you along as we ride the Shinkansen from Tokyo, check into our hotel, and immediately dive into Sendai’s culinary scene. We’ll try the city’s two most famous dishes: savory grilled beef tongue (gyutan) and the uniquely sweet edamame paste treat, zunda. We’ll explore the bustling Clisroad Shopping Street, get lucky with some gashapon, and even catch the spectacular fireworks kicking off the Sendai Tanabata Festival.

Next, we embark on a scenic train journey to Yamadera to climb the 1,000 stone steps to its stunning mountaintop temple, offering panoramic views that are absolutely worth the hike. After our spiritual journey, we refuel with some amazing soba noodles before heading back to Sendai for more shopping and a delicious yakitori dinner.

✅ You might enjoy watching some more of our Japan travel series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL14F9F774CE8798C3

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