Onsen time!
After our day at Tobu World Square on Monday, we dipped our toes into Japanese onsen culture with a one-hour booking of a private room at a local onsen.
Onsen is the word used for hot springs and the bathing facilities and traditional inns around them. Usually this is a communal but gender segregated activity (i.e. yes, you are naked in a hot tub with strangers, but only ones of the same gender), so renting a private family room for our first onsen experience was a great way to ease into this very unfamiliar but apparently universally beloved Japanese tradition!
Our private hut had a large, heated area for getting undressed/dressed, and on the verandah were two hot tubs (one wood, one stone) with water at slightly different temperatures. I think the warmer one was about 38°C. It was certainly lovely to soak in the warm water while looking out at the trees (and the cars driving across the bridge!) as darkness fell.
The next day, we left Nikko and drove to Shibu Onsen, an onsen town close to the famous Japanese snow monkeys (see B's post about those cuties!). We spent one night there in a Japanese-style room in a traditional onsen hotel.
That afternoon, we were able to reserve a 40-minute timeslot in the hotel's outdoor onsen for our own private use. This time it started snowing just before we got out of the onsen. Amazing!
Afterwards, for dinner, we drove to a little restaurant we'd found on Google. Well, the restaurant might have been little, but the meal size wasn't! Below you can see their regular size chicken curry (there was also a large size!), with J's hand for size reference. This ~$14 AUD meal was shared by B, J and me. There were photos on the wall (you can see some behind F below) of customers who had managed to eat the whole meal (possibly the large size?) themselves — including some petite Japanese women!
But back to the topic of onsen... these gentle introductory experiences turned out to be the beginning of six consecutive days of onsen-ing for us. Our current accommodation in Ishiuchi has only communal bathing facilities (no ensuites etc), so we're not just dipping our toes in but experiencing the real deal here! Lots of googling to learn about onsen etiquette has been helpful/ reassuring/ necessary!
(To be fair, I've yet to have someone else in the tub at the same time as me, but B and the boys have, and they got a chatty one! I think we have finally discovered the secret of how to have a proper long conversation with a Japanese person! 😂)