Company Trip Continued

Once we arrived at the Japanese Inn, we moved into our rooms and headed straight for the hot springs. These baths were separated guys and girls, and everyone underwent an elaborate washing process before stepping into the actual hot spring baths. It was really really nice. The water was pretty darn hot, and the huge bath was indoors. It reminded me of those Roman style baths you sometimes see in the movies, it even had water coming out of a statue of a naked woman. It was pretty hard to stay in the water for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time because it was so hot.

About 10 feet away, still indoors, was a cold water tub. All of us were trying to one up each other by staying in the cold water tub for as long as we could. I lasted about 20 seconds. It was really fun just relaxing and kind of cleansing ourselves from the stress of the big city.

The Inn had another male bath on top of the roof. All of us headed up to the top and we noticed that there was a fake bamboo fence that surrounded the bath to “protect” other people from looking at us while we were naked in the bath. Well, it worked pretty well for everyone who may be at the same level as us on the roof, but across the street was a 20 story hotel staring straight down at us. Sure enough, there was a woman standing by her window watching the 7 of us get into the tub. We naturally started waving and strutting around the deck. The Germans started waving their butts at her, trying to provoke some sort of response. Finally, after about a minute she bowed towards us and left—only to return with a female friend! The two of them watched us for another few minutes, but we honestly didn’t care. I would find out later that every day the baths switch from being girls’ to guys’ so that by tomorrow, that particular bath would be the girls’ one.

Anyway, it was soon time for dinner and we dressed in our traditional robes and made our way to our private room. There was a tray on the floor for each person and we sat in a lard horseshoe shape. We had to sit on the ground, which was a pain in the butt for all us non-Japanese, but it was really nice to have a traditional meal. There was a river fish, sashimi pieces, shabu shabu (raw meat that you boil in water) for every person.

The room we were in for dinner had a private stage, so near the end of the meal a few of us got up on it and started singing karaoke (there was a machine there, but we didn’t get it to work. We just sang into the mic). One for the funnier moments was when Kishimoto’s son (Kishimoto is our resident Japanese teacher on staff), who was about 8 years old, got up on the stage and started playing around with all the machinery. His mother yelled “yamenasai” which basically means “stop it!” and he made a face and mimicked “yamenasai” right back at his mom. It was just like an American kid imitating his mom saying “stop that”. That got everyone laughing, although Kishimoto-san was clearly embarrassed.

After dinner the guys (the 4 interns and 3 Germans) went back to the room and cracked open the 100 bucks worth of alcohol we brought on the trip. We played games (poker, among others) and around 12:30 headed back up to the roof hot spring bath. All of us pretty buzzed we turned out all the lights on the roof and just looked at the stars. It was a pretty amazing sight—we never can see the stars in Tokyo. It was a perfectly clear night.

I’ll write about the rafting next time. It’s time for bed.