September 22nd, Back To Hell (the Good One, of course)

On Tuesday I puttered around until 1 o’clock when I met Kei the Australian at the station. We made it on the train in its last 30 seconds at the station and had a smooth ride to the big onsen city, Steph: 1, Japanese Transit Goblins: 0. (Onsen means hot spring, in case you forgot.)

But before the onsen soak, we decided to go down into hell valley and I showed Kei all the best spots on the hiking trail. Maybe next week or the week after my region will be in full fall color change! We spent a good amount of time soaking our feet in the natural river that’s as warm as bath water, which was welcome because we hadn’t really had time to do so when I was there last. Because of the holiday it was even more crowded than it was for the festival, complete with whole busloads of Chinese tourists. Other than the Chinese though, we were the only foreigners in the whole city! A strange experience for being such a metropolitan area! One tour guide took the time to explain to me that you can use the mineralized, river-worn rocks to exfoliate your feet while you soak. I hadn't thought of that before and I like the idea so much that I brought one home :)

During this trip, one of my goals was to continue my photo quest http://www.flickr.com/photos/amofawesome/sets/ and though the lighting was bad all day, I did manage to get some pictures I liked. (See The GSW Photo Quest 2)

This tour meant a lot of walking, so afterwards we stopped on the main drag in town to get something to eat and restore our energy. I decided to try ochazuke for the first time. It’s a dish made by filling a bowl with very simple savory things like rice, salmon flakes, seaweed, and sesame seeds, and then green tea is poured over it. It’s a unique flavor concept, but the flavors are so mild that you don’t really mind. Wikipedia describes the tea-to-food ratio as, “the same proportions as cereal and milk.” Lol

It was funny, I ordered it expecting chicken and eggs, because like a rice dish I’ve had before, it was called “oyako type,” which means “parent and child,” but in fact it was salmon and ikura (fish eggs). That’s parent and child too, after all!

Then it came time for the onsen, and we decided not to skimp on the grandeur, so we ended up at the ritziest hotel in town to try the fancy bathhouse with the most baths. It was inside the hotel at the top of the main street of the onsen district, the place whose patio served as the grounds for the opening ceremony of the Hell Festival.

This is where I stop so as to give the onsen experience it's own blog entry :)

September 22nd, Onsen Zen

Passing through sliding glass doors flanked by flaming torches, we entered the famous onsen hotel. I kind of expected a Japanese flute to sound somewhere off in the distance.

The hotel was so big that I had to ask for directions to get to the onsen. Using Japanese here wasn’t really a problem though, seeing as I’d forced myself not to be nervous about anything today. I was about to get naked in front of a bunch of people, after all, what language problem did I have to fear?

We paid our fees and walked a million miles into the depths of the hotel, walking past massage stations and riding an elevator with only two buttons, “Lobby” and “Onsen.” Best elevator ever! We’d been wearing indoor slippers that we acquired at the entrance, so when took them off to enter the dressing room it was kind of hilarious. I’d taken the bigger size slippers from the lobby, which meant that since it was a Japanese women’s locker room, there was my one pair of gigantic baby blue men’s slippers in a sea of tiny navy women’s ones.

I’d been pushing back thoughts of awkwardness all day, but I realized I didn’t really have to suppress them at all because once the whole business started, it wasn’t very scary. It’s all very natural as you pick a basket, strip down, and head out to the showers.

The whole place was pretty luxuriant, like a spa, really, and at the entrance to the baths, there a line of little vanities where you sit on your Japanese shower bucket and scrub down. An important aspect of the Japanese hot spring bath is that you don’t use it to bathe, you use it to soak, so putting soap or hair into the bath is a big no-no, and seeing as it’s communal, you have to scrub very well before you enter. Since it was such a nice hotel, they had quality shampoos and cleansing oils there for you to use, and there are also little mirrors - maybe in case you forgot what you looked like without any clothes. Seriously though, the mirror is the only reminder that you are in the buff.

Then you get up and walk around, looking for baths and carrying clothesless conversations as naturally as if you were dressed in a three piece suit. Some women carry “modesty towels,” small towels they’ll carry in front of their bodies which they then use to exfoliate or wrap around their hair. The modesty towel is really more like a distraction than an actual cover though, it’s kind of the equivalent of carrying a drink at a party.

It would have been more refreshing to be at the hot spring if the day had been cooler, but after all our walking and the temperate weather, we got pretty toasty pretty fast. I’m not sure about this onsen, but the area is famous for its natural springs so I think perhaps the natural water is tapped in somehow. In areas where they are not renowned for good water, usually it’s tap water with additives. I’m not sure, but I’m hoping this comes straight from the ground. The first bath we tried had an open window view into hell valley, which was pretty neat. In the States this would never happen – “someone might see you!!” But here it was just fine. There were tall trees planted and it wasn’t such an angle that it put you in line with the tourists’ view or anything, but still the laxness is mildly entertaining. In fact, I think the men’s baths *do* look out over the tourist part of the valley.

I wanted to try a thick green-colored bath, but the water was just too hot and I couldn’t bring myself to get in it. We toured some of the outdoor baths but they were pretty hot and pretty crowded so we didn’t stay long.

I’ve heard foreign people worry about getting stared at for looking different in the onsen, but even though we were the only white people in town that day, few people actually stared, even after we traded our clothes for onsen bliss. It was, however, a little weird getting into the larger outdoor bath because for whatever reason, though they ignored us before, everyone stopped to stare at us. It wasn’t really like we were being sized up though, it was the typical foreigner stare that I get on the street when I’m riding my bicycle. The more face-oriented stare that says, “Oh! You’re not from around here! If I was bold we would have a conversation right now!” We had some good quality talk time at that point, Kei and I soaking in minerals among the baby trees, though occasionally my mind wandered to how big of a catastrophe it would be to suddenly be discovered by mosquitoes.

By then it was too hot and I even copied the other women and sat mostly out of the water. If you’d have asked me this time last year if I thought I’d be stark naked up to my knees in sulfuric water in a forest with a bunch of Japanese woman, I would have said “uh…probably not.”

When we’d had enough soaking, we headed to the last two baths, the gimmick ones. The first was a nice tepid water over a pool shaped like an easy chair and the other was a stool with a stream of water that massages your back and shoulders. I figured that was a good way to end things and headed out.

In my haste to get ready in time for dinner, I forgot to use the complimentary scale and drink the complimentary tea, but I did enjoy the huge gorgeous vanities complete with toiletries, hair driers, and ambient task lighting to reapply my make-up. I could primp in that room ANY DAY. When we left, I was literally glowing with heat, health, and happiness. All night I smelled vaguely of minerals and when Kei’s student/friend Asami picked us up in her car we fogged up the windows.

It was very late at that point, but Asami took us out for Mongolian Barbecue, which is essentially a little grill in the center of your table where you grill meat and vegetables yourself. This was much calmer than the Genghis Khan party with the ALTs, seeing as we trusted each other not to steal each other’s meat and there was plenty of meat to begin with! We drank lime and grape chuuhai mixers and ate real beef (probably the first time I’ve done that since I’ve been here!) and seasoned chicken and pork. This is a dream come true after eating nothing but pork in this city. Where the pork comes from, I’ll never know, considering I haven’t seen any animals anywhere near here. Though I guess we’re not eating the cows I see in Wisconsin either. Still, it’s eerie when there’s so little agriculture. But that’s probably less of a “Japan” thing and more of a “I’ve always been in agricultural cities” type thing.

Anyway, yummy vegetables, yummy meat, and good company. Asami was very cute and her English was good enough that we were easily able to teach each other things. She was impressed by my kanji, and in fact I even impressed myself because I’ve learned very many of them lately and hadn’t really had a chance to use them yet. Turns out many of them appear in restaurant talk :)

This is definitely not the last time I’m going to the onsen district, nor the last time I’m seeing these friends.

September 23rd, Guts and Glory

My absence from work won't stop me from posting about the walk.

Today, sheer pluck got me across town to the old train station by bike. Over a week ago I went jogging and when I saw how far I'd gotten, I said to myself, "Y'know what? It's far, but I bet I could bike to the port." I could see the colored lights on the mountain above the station, so how far could it be?

The next day I had a volunteer meeting at the old train station, so I thought I'd try to bike there. I biked for about 40 minutes and I watched as the mountain changed orientation. I kept trying to turn toward it, but on and on stretched the factories and I couldn't get through them. At one point, when I could see the station over the expressway and down the mountain, I found a little inlet and went inside. I carried my bike down a long row of stairs, only to be stopped by a friendly old security guard at the bottom, who in very apologetic Japanese told me it was a factory zone.

Up the stairs again, I carried the bike. It was about as far as I wanted to go for the day and I turned around and biked 40 minutes back home. I was tired and I was dismayed by how much my industrial city looked like a locale from a dystopian Sci-Fi novel. But that is not the end.

Today, in honor of exploration and self-improvement, I decided to try again. It was later than I'd hoped to leave, but hey, what better thing did I have to do? My real goal was to explore new locations for my Silver Week photography project, and I didn't even know if I could find anything there or if it would still be light enough by the time I arrived. I ran into my American neighbor as I was setting up my bike, and he said, "You might want to go East, there's a beautiful park in the next city but maybe it's a little late to start toward it. You just go over the bridge...hey, what am I saying. Go explore!"

I was tempted. This is his third year here and he's done a lot of exploring of his own. It's probably a great park.

"We'll see where I go when I hit the end of the driveway," I said. And I meant that.

Dropping over the cement embankment, the bike turned West. I was going back to the station and the mountain.

I thought I'd try a new route and took off toward the main road, which I know I've taken to my destination by car before, but somehow I ended up walking my bike up and up a mountain. It was a great experience, dodging between houses and temples and playing chicken with cars on streets that looked like bike paths. The steepest inhabited mountain I've been on in Japan. But in the end it was a series of dead ends and when I got back to the original road, I was only two blocks from where I'd begun.

So I took the same route, on and on and on, and this time I kept going. Just before dark - an hour and a half after I'd left home and miles from where I'd stopped last time - I rolled into the Nagasakiya parking lot where there was finally a road that turned toward the mountain I wanted. I took a deep breath, started up the overpass, and...heard someone screaming my name? My students :) I didn't recognize a single one of them, but we talked and I made note of which classes they were in for future reference.

I was downtown. I went to the station. The light was awful and I'm not proud of any of my pictures from today...but I'd made it to the mountain. Oddly enough, biking the hour back, the street didn't seem quite as dark or quite as narrow as it had the last time I'd been through.

The GSW Photo Quest: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amofawesome/sets/

When I got home, I continued my glory by cooking the first recipe from my new all-Japanese cookbook. Only a few minutes after I began did I realize that I was following a different recipe than the recipe I'd wanted to make based on the picture, but they were largely the same and anyway I think I'll have enough ingredients that I can make the one I was originally shooting for after I pick up one or two more things at the store. Not a failure, I assure you. It was highly delicious and again contained shimeiji mushrooms.

September 24th and 25th, ZOMG

ZOMG AFTER ALMOST TWO MONTHS this is the entry where I catch up!

Too bad I'll fall behind again when my computer gets sent off to be fixed.

Yesterday after classes ended I had a nice long work period and chat with the Smartest Girl in School. I'm really enjoying school a lot more now that I have relationships with some of the students.

Granted, this made me get home a little later than I wanted but I thought I'd still be okay for time before getting to my English conversation group. Unfortunately, I was a little too relaxed and after making excellent fried rice with egg (or more accurately for what I'd made, fried egg with rice lol) I arrived at the station just in time to watch my train take off.

Well, after some awkward, unintelligble conversations with The Actress, I hopped the next train and was only a few minutes late. I'd considered riding my bike again, but I knew it'd take just about as long as waiting for the next train, plus I'd be tired and half to bike all the way back. Going so far once a week is probably enough.

The conversation group will meet in an old rathole of a building, kind of creepy and run-down, in fact. At first I was a little nervous about how things were going to turn out, seeing as I've had bad experiences going into situations where people had certain expectations of me (which usually are not made known to me until after the fact). As it turned out, I'd successfully made my activities applicable to multiple levels of English, and even the students whose English was quite poor turned out warming up. Suddenly the impossible 20-something Japanese was also intelligible and between all the intelligibleness, both languages were a huge success. I ironed out my plans with Mochi for Sunday's cruise ship welcome, but I'll be dressing up as a samurai from 6 AM to 9 PM, so really, how could this day go wrong?

I also got to try a new food, since one of the conversation group members had visited Tokyo over Silver Week and brought back omiyage. It was what I call, for lack of better description, "chestnut flavored sweet red bean paste jelly logs." As unappetizing as it sounds, it's pretty good lol

And suddenly my Japanese burn-out rut broke! I felt good last night, and then today I walked down to buy a bentou from the lady at the snack window and the Japanese just came spewing from my mouth. Of course I made mistakes and of course she spoke slowly and chose her words carefully, but the fact that I could do it after all the involuntary tuning out I'd been doing was pretty sweet. Then the Vice Principal joined us and the three of us had the cutest Steph-loving chat ever about food and Silver week and other parts of Japanese life that I can now accomplish on my own.

Tonight I'm supposed to do some dinner with the other foreigners again, but I haven't heard from most of them so it might just be me biking out to the park in the next city to take more picture. No argument here! Now, after a 2-day work week I head off into the weekend ready for good times, hard work, and lots of cleaning that I'd put off all during Silver Week :)