Mt. Fuji Part Two

Starting Part Two….picking up from where I stopped last time…

The rest of the ALTs came back to the cars around 11:00 a.m., and we drove to the hostel we were going to stay at. Instead of sleeping, though, some of us (a Canadian girl, an American guy, and two British guys) drove to McDonald’s for lunch—I know, embarrassing. When we got back, more people were getting ready to go to the onsen, a Japanese public bath. So I decided to go.

I wasn’t sure what to expect: naked public bathing isn’t really in American culture so I had no reference for it. However, it was much cooler and much less uncomfortable than I had thought. There were five of us English-speakers to begin with, and as we were leaving, a couple more JETs came in.

This is how it worked: we walked into the building, took off our outside shoes and barefooted or in sock feet walked to the counter, where we told the man that we wanted a bath. He rented towels for 200 yen, and after we paid for everything, we went into the women’s section. It was kind of like a locker room, but fancier and more Japanese, with pretty woven baskets to put your belongings in, or, if you don’t trust your co-bathers, rented lockers with locks on them. My friends and I stripped naked, gathered our towels (which maybe we weren’t supposed to do, since I didn’t see anyone else with towels…) and walked into the actual bathing area, separated from the changing room by two sets of double glass doors.

The bathing area was huge. A row of sit-down showers were against two walls; each cubicle had a plastic stool to sit on, a mirror, big containers of shampoo, conditioner, and body soap, a faucet and a removable showerhead. Besides the shower sections was a gigantic pool of hot water about two and a half or three feet deep, and another hot-tub-esque pool of bubbling water. There were women at almost all of the showers, but I found an empty one, sat down on the stool and lathered up. (One must be clean before entering the bath!) After rinsing off –you NEVER get into the tub soapy or dirty!—I padded along to the first tub and sunk down into the richest (in the Spanish sense of rico) bath I’ve ever taken. The water was the perfect temperature of hot, and even though I had a slight sunburn, it felt delicious on my sore muscles.

After resting there for about 10 minutes, I went outside to the open-air tubs, and joined my friends at one. It was part of an enclosed patio surrounded by trees and plants. I felt like royalty soaking in a warm bathtub under a clear blue sky, soaking up the water and the sun. After another 10 minutes, I went to explore another outside tub, shaped like a gigantic stone soup bowl filled to the brim and overflowing with the water that constantly poured in from an open spigot. How to describe: the blue sky, the slight breeze, the not-as-hot-as-Gunma sun, the sound of the water flowing into the tub. . . ? One would think being naked in front of your new friends and a couple of perfect strangers would be strange, but the fact that everyone is naked makes it a little easier.

After soaking in the various pools, we got up to go. I got dressed and went to wait for my friends in the waiting room, where I tried out a “jacket massager”: a little coat that beats out a rhythm onto your back and shoulders with a little hammer. I still hadn’t slept by this time (it was 3:30 p.m. and I had been awake for almost 32 hours) but the water and the heat made me even sleepier. Straight upon returning to the hostel I fell sound asleep for two hours on my hot top bunk in the 8-bed room.

Dinner consisted of conveyor belt sushi, much like what I had had with my host family a few weeks ago, except this time it wasn’t 100 yen sushi (~$1) but 100-800 yen, depending on what color plate you chose. (Interesting side note: waitresses in restaurants like these have a cool apparatus that scans your stack of used plates and automatically totals the cost.)

We got back to the hostel around 8:30 p.m. and I was sound asleep by 8:45.

The next day, well-rested, we were awoken at 7:00 a.m. by charming classical music that started playing softly, but gradually increased in volume until the proprietor was certain every person in the sleeping quarters was awake. We left the hostel for Fuji-Q (or Fuji-Kyu, depending on where you see it written) Highland, an amusement park like Kings Dominion/Carowinds but with less rides. Everyone made a beeline for the tallest, scariest, twistiest, up-side-down-iest one, but three of my friends and I declined politely and went to another one—still wickedly high and made my heart go into my throat. I ended up riding three roller coasters, and I wonder if my roller coastering days are over . . . .

Lunch was pizza and fries from Pizza-La, which had weird combinations like a meal of 2 slices of pizza, fries, and chicken nuggets, but no drink. There were also pizzas with corn on them and pizzas with cut up hot dogs on them, which I didn’t try.

It was a fun day, but we had to leave early so the boys in my car could catch their train back. There was terrible, bumper-to-bumper traffic most of the way back, and to pass the time we played a Japanese word game where you have to make a word out of the last letter of the word the previous person said, without using a word that ends with n (i.e. “ramen” or “gohan” is off-limits). So the game goes like this: one person says, “Go-mi” (trash), the next person says “Migi” (right, not left), the third person says a word that starts with “gi” that I can’t think of now. We also played some game that involves everyone putting their hands into fists with the fingers together so the thumbs can come up easily. You say some special word in Japanese that I’ve forgotten now as I’m typing this, and end with a number that isn’t higher than the number of thumbs possible (so the three people playing have six thumbs in total). At the same time that you say whatever that magical last word is, everyone raises one or two thumbs, and the person whose turn it is guesses what the number of thumbs raised will be. For example, if the person whose turn it is says, “Magical word – san! (three)” and there are three thumbs up, he wins that round. If there are not three thumbs up, it’s the next person’s turn. When you lose a round you take away a hand. Somehow I ended up winning, and I can barely count to ten in Japanese—impressive!

Unfortunately, we were so late getting back that I missed the last bus and the boys missed their last train. I took a $30 taxi home, but couldn’t tell the driver how to get to my apartment, so I just said, “Koko, onegaishimasu” (Here, please) and walked the rest of the ten minutes home, using my Fuji walking stick and ignoring my screaming legs.

And that was my Mt. Fuji weekend.