Berry's SEAJ trip Day 63: Fukushima prefecture for Monkey waiters (8/7/15)

After grabbing lunch with Kei, I get on the shinkansen and head towards Koriyama to check into my place that I rented on AirBNB which was a spot on this guy's living room floor which saved me ~150/night.

These rice fields are starting to look the golden color I was promised in the beginning of the trip. Insanely gorgeous and cool to be able to see the change in color over time.

Finally found the monkey waiter place after walking around at dusk in a random city. Turns out it had been closed for some time and with all the old stories I was reading, not one did I pick up that it was closed. Oh well, was a nice walk and was nice to walk through random neighborhoods with no place to be.

Found a random place on my walk back and struggled through ordering based on a few things I learned with my time with Takao and family. Not too bad of a result if you ask me (and it was delicious) :)

After dropping my stuff off, I get back to the train station (about a 15-20 min walk) to head to Utsunomiya to go to the monkey tavern place I saw on TV a few years ago where the monkeys serve you sake (yeah I know awesome!). It was a nice evening so I walked the 4km to the place and when I get there I cannot open the door as they were currently closed. So I go to a nearby restaurant to eat and try to get to the bottom of this and it turns out, it closed after the Fukushima meltdown a few years prior and haven't opened since. I do not know how I missed that in all the searching I did for this place but alas, it is what it is. So I ordered in this place that spoke no English and me even less Japanese using hand signals and good ole fashioned pointing on menus. As it turns out, I selected Katzudon, which I love; Katzudon (Sp?) is a rice bowl with fried pork on top. After that and my beer, I head back to the rail station to get back to my place to get a good nights sleep.