October 5 – Sendai, Japan

Zuiganji temple

Weather

Zuiganji temple

– 24º and partly sunny…PRAISE THE
LORD! I was actually hot a couple of times today, no jacket or zippy…just a t-shirt

Steps –

13 hours 58 min of daylight

Latitude – Calgary 51º, Sendai 38º

Sendai (pop 1,098,335) is where we woke up today. The city of trees is Sendai’s nickname, but I’d say everything we’ve seen of Japan so far could be called the cities of trees – certainly the country of green…everything has been very lush. I found a pretty big dragon fly, I guess they like the green too. Our excursion took us out of

Zuiganji temple

Sendai for the most part, so we didn’t see much of the city itself.

Zuiganji temple

Our tour started in the town of Matsushima a 40 min drive from Sendai. We drove along fields and fields of rice. Along the way Echo, our guide gave us some background on the temple we were about to visit. She also told us various things about Japan – she was an excellent guide. Matsushima is a very touristy, but charming area before we visited Zuiganji, a Zen Buddhist temple founded in 828 AD. The actual building we visited was built in the early 17th century.

The temple has the nightingale alarm floors we learned about last time in Japan. These wooden floors make noises intruders walk across them – very cool. This time Echo had too many other things to tell us, that she didn’t mention the floors, if you knew about them, they were super obvious.

We have been hoping to visit a sake brewery in Japan and today was that day. I know what sake is and have tasted it, in fact each time we’ve gone to Pacific Rim, the ship’s Asian themed restaurant we’ve had it, but I don’t know much about it.

Our sake education was at Ichinokura brewery. We learned how sake is made and the rituals surrounding it. They make sake here from

rice fields

underground stream water and local rice. We learned about the process to develop a yeast or the “mother of sake” and fermentation. We toured the factory, sampled 5 of their sakes, and browsed the minimal shop, but didn’t buy.

This tour was great. Echo was great, the other

sake lesson

participants were great, and there were only about 23 of us. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time for free time at Matsushima. It would have been fun to have a drink and a snack.

We were back at the boat for a late lunch and some actual pool time! Our tour didn’t leave this morning until 10:30, so we had morning pool time too.

filled with sake

I even did my blogging on the balcony for the first time this cruise before dinner tonight. It’s been an expected disappointment not being able to use the balcony as my as we like. I think I’d happily do it again to see the part of the world we saw. However…next cruise will be a warm weather cruise!

the pilot coming to lead us out

Echo told us about how the 2011 earthquake and tsunami affected the area. The initial tsunami was 3.2 metres and the second 3.8 metres. We saw how far into the temple the water got and how many trees were killed on the temple grounds. 20 people were killed in the area.

Japanese dusky sky

Last night was the last Guess That Tu
ne for this cruise. If there were more, we might not make a huge effort to get t

Japanese pine tree

here. We actually came in third place with 8/15 correct guesses. The remaining 7 we didn’t even have a clue about. We have returned to the Regent of old, the Regent that
thinks we’re all from the pre-WW2 era. We had a switch in piano players at the beginning of the cruise and ohhhh how we miss the last guy. The current one plays some current-ish stuff when he is just playing, but his Guess That Tune selections are mostly from before I WAS BORN! I googled each of the 15 songs from last night and the youngest one was from 1978!!!!! Honestly! Not the end of the world but come on.

sake brewery