My Trip to a Japanese Hotel

NOW with PICTURES!

So this all began, from my perspective, with one of the program coordinators for the Tsuru program, Fumi-san, informing me that I was to attend a party on Tuesday.  This was not uncommon.  Since coming here I've been invited/coerced into going to several events that I would describe as parties, at the school or at someone's house or apartment, and I figured this would be no exception.  However, a couple of days before the party took place I learned that we had been invited to a rather high class hotel by the owner, who I gather is a contact of Fumi-san's, though I never found out for sure.  We were to have dinner and there was a hot spring that we could go in if we wanted to.  It would be just foreign exchange students and their tutors.

Despite being a little bit baffled as to why we had been invited, and free of charge no less, Tina and I both thought it would be a lot of fun, so on Tuesday evening we boarded the bus that would take us to the hotel, located next to the beautiful Lake Kawaguchi (which now that I'm typing it out, sounds like it means "river mouth."  Just a fun fact.)  It's sad that I don't even know the name of the hotel, and therefore am having trouble googling a picture of it, and even more sad that Tina didn't bring her camera so that we could take some ourselves, but for now teksht will have to suffice.

Upon arriving and discovering just how upscale this hotel looked, we were surprised to receive three room keys for those of us that wanted to stay the night.  Tina and I had class the next day, and had not even finished our homework, so that option was unfortunately not for us.

After dropping stuff off in one of the rooms, we headed to the dining hall where we were met with an extravagant, buffet-style meal that featured steak, Japanese food (including sushi), Chinese food and dessert.

As surprised as we were by this meal, we were a little bit more surprised by the horde of Chinese people that arrived 20 minutes after us.  I'm quite a bit hazy on a lot of the details surrounding the arrangement's of that night, but it seemed to me as though this was their party and we had been invited to crash it.  As penance, the students from Tsuru were asked to each sing a song for karaoke afterwards.  I would say "we," but frankly they didn't have any English songs I knew (that I saw at least), and I can't read very fast in Japanese even for songs I do know relatively well in that language.  Tina was in the same boat, so it was impractical at best to ask either of us to sing, and no one really expected us to.  Our tutors did though. ^_^  Despite the fact that a larger portion of the Tsuru students sang, it was still mostly Chinese guests, as their group was quite a bit bigger than ours.  I have no idea why, but the Chinese students that sang were all really good, like, illogically good.  They also sang in Chinese, Japanese and, go figure, English.  This was also marked a two for two rate of me hearing the Evangelion theme song at a karaoke session in Japan.  Apparently that one is pretty popular.

(For people who don't know it and are curious:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A62011nyXNI  It's the TV version, although the one sung in karaoke is always the full version I think.  I included this one because it has subtitles and less disturbing footage than the first video I clicked on.  I'm pretty sure Evangelion is one of the most popular anime of all time, but also one of the strangest.)





In case you haven't noticed yet, I've given up on that two finger/peace/victory pose business.  It doesn't suit me very well.

t was around this time that Tina and I started seriously considering staying the night even though it sounded like an academically bad idea.  For one, it was looking like we were going to have to leave soon and miss our chance to go the the hot spring.  Besides that, we were also just having a lot of fun.  I decided to compromise by texting Fumi-san and asking her whether or not she thought it was okay.  Never did get a text back from that <_<;;

Anyhow, following dinner we and some of our friends went out to fetch something to drink.  Although it hadn't been clear to Tina and I at the time, we had been planning to go to a bar.  The bar that people seemed to have in mind was tiny and packed to the brim with people though, so what we actually wound up doing is grabbing alcohol from a convenience store and bringing it back to the hotel.  Before drinking though, it was hot spring time.

Personally, I had never been to a hot spring before, and didn't know all of the procedures for how to do so. I'll give them retrospectively here (for a hotel specifically I guess):

- There was a room immediately next to the hot spring where you take of your clothes.  You should have a big towel, a little towel and a yukata, which is what you'll wear when you're done (and clean ^__^)
- Before going in the hot spring you wash yourself so that you're clean before you enter.  It's best to use as hot of water as you're able to while you do this, so that you won't have too hard of a time getting into the water.  If you're extra cool, you'll dump the bucket of water over your head to rinse off, because that's the cool thing to do. =D
- Remember that little towel I mentioned?  Bring it into the hot spring, get it wet, and put it on your head.  There's no reason for this, but it's part of the experience.  Don't bring your big towel in, like I did.
- When you begin to feel faint, you should probably get out.  If you're at a nice place, the other room will have stuff like a hair dryer and a scale so you can see how much weight you sweated off.  (At least that's what I think it's for.)  Dry off and don your yukata.

It was really refreshing ^___^.

After that we sat in a circle with some of the Chinese guests in one of our rooms and played a Japanese drinking game, but instead of drinking if you lost you had to either answer an embarrassing question or do an embarrassing thing.  We didn't have enough alcohol for everyone to drink when they lost. xD  It was kind of like truth or dare, but you didn't get to choose.



Tina's embarrassing thing she had to do was give me a kiss, and wouldn't you know it, everyone was making such a big deal out of it that I was actually embarrassed.



Around 1 a.m., Tina and I retired to one of the other rooms that we had thankfully been given the opportunity to share by our lonesome, and went to bed.  The plan was to wake up at 7, eat delicious breakfast, and get on the bus that we had arranged for to take us back to our apartment.  From there, we grabbed all of our school stuff, walked to school and finished our homework before class started.  Shapow.

(Of humorous note was the fact that Fumi-san only noticed my text the following morning and, freaking out a little bit, came to class to see if we were there.)

Blog entries coming up soon:  Interesting facts about Japan Part 2, and probably something to do with Kyoto, as we will be heading there in 2 days.