I got up this morning and my back (really my right hip) still hurt. I tried some of the psoas stretches I saw online that seemed to help yesterday morning but they did nothing today. After breakfast I took 2 ibuprofen and either it didn’t do much or it took a while to kick in. My sister later reminded me that my father had back problems when we visited Japan a long time ago as well. Stupid genes.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I had the same breakfast as I did yesterday and it was still good. Took me a while to eat it because my hip hurt.

After breakfast I packed up and made my way back to the acupuncturist and when I arrived my hip hurt so bad I couldn’t sit and wait. I had to walk around outside. Luckily it was a much nicer day. And while he didn’t fix everything, it was better afterwards.

I got my train ticket to Sasebo. Usually there’s two ways there, one using the shinkansen and one taking the coastal route that takes longer. Unfortunately due to track repairs, the coastal route wasn’t running today. That’s OK, I wanted to take the new Nagasaki shinkansen anyway. I had some time to kill so I looked for a place to sit down. Short chairs make things worse for me, and the waiting area had short chairs. I ended up at the outdoor seating at Mickey D’s. The new station is scheduled to open on 11/10 (yeah, Friday) so here’s the view.

At least it kept the crowds down and I could get an outdoor seat. The box is some weird triangular lava cake-sorta thing. It wasn’t bad but lava cakes are pretty much chocolate overload for me.

Oh, here’s the building that would’ve been nice if it was open.

I took the toy shinkansen to the end of the route, a whole 30 minutes away. There’s some feuding with Saga prefecture who vies for the bottom spot as the ugliest prefecture. I suppose the real list is “the most beautiful prefecture” but I don’t know what else you’d call the bottom of that list.

The seats were oddly made of wood as well.

There you have to get on a relay train to Hakata where you can link up with all the other shinkansen lines in the country.

I took the train to Sasebo instead. It felt quite odd, driving slowly and steadily through the countryside. It felt like it was going slower than the one car trains I’d been on earlier in the week and it was quieter and, uh, steadier, and the seats were quite nice.

When we got close to Sasebo we had one of those weird stops where the train pulled into the station and then backed out again, going backwards for the last little bit to Sasebo.

I asked the tourist bureau what I should see. They told me to go visit the 99 islands. I guess there really are 208 islands but 99 was symbolic for “too many islands to count”. They said take the bus to the end, take the boat trip around the islands, take a taxi up to the viewpoint, and then take the bus back. The bus is ¥140 and the taxi would be closer to ¥4000.

I got off the bus and found out I was on the last boat of the day!

Quite a few people who sounded like SE Asian Chinese, and a whole busload of middle school students from Kirishima. Yeah, from my first stop of the trip! Back when I still felt OK!

The island were quite pretty but it got slightly cold and very windy today. I took the cab up to the viewpoint and it wasn’t any warmer. Also, there was nothing other than a field of flowers and a viewpoint. No buildings other than a toilet.

I wasn’t about to sit and wait an hour and 15 minutes for the bus so I took the cab back to my hotel. I’m wondering about my love for Toyoko Inn. The rooms are clean, cheap, and fairly spacious. You get a “free” small breakfast. But the walls are very thin which can be offset by using earplugs. And it’s also the only hotel where I’ve ever seen the police. And today, the lobby was crawling with police. I think the patrons were being Japanese Karens and called the police because they thought they were being slighted because later I saw them standing outside. I also overheard one of them telling the police to do their job. I dunno. Made me kind of wary but I’ve not had any trouble. LIke I said, clean, spacious, cheap, and a bit loud.

So I ticked off a few things off my Sasebo list. The other thing was to eat Sasebo food. I wanted to get a Sasebo burger for lunch and I was told I should try the lemon steak for dinner. Fortunately there was a quaint Showa era-ish restaurant right at the station. And the food was quite tasty.

The lemon steak was great. It comes with a yakiniku-style sauce and was completely cooked on that hot plate. They bring it out to you and you need to flip it to cook both sides. The meat was called Nagasaki wagyu and I believe it. After you finish the meat you can put the rest of the rice on the hot plate to soak up the sauce. I wasn’t completely full so I ordered a Sasebo burger as well. For ¥800 how big could it be?

It’s hard to tell from the picture because all you can see is the lettuce but it had tomato, a good-sized patty, and the sauces were mustard mayo and something also close to yakiniku sauce. The beef had the weird bitter/medicinal taste that some Japanese hamburgers have but it was quite good. I’d say it tasted a little like a homemade Mos Burger but about 1.5x the size. I was quite full.

And now I’m in my room taking it easy. The acupuncturist told me the best thing is if could get more sleep. Well I’m in bed for at least 8 hours a night. I wanted to say, “More sleep? Maybe if the GD hotels didn’t stick me in a furnace and you guys legalized what I use for a sleep aid (it grows in fields in Oregon if you need a hint) I would be sleeping just fine!” Can’t have it all, I guess.