Japan - revisited

Although it would be fun to leave the bath house experience hanging out there, untold, I think I should quickly fill in the detail. It seems a long time ago now but it was only last week I was standing out side the bath house door in my special pjs wondering if I was meant to get undressed or not before going in and how do I go about pretending I know what I’m doing? It had been over thirty six hours since I had last showered, so was in need of a wash.

I had briefly read a lonely planet about the edict while still in Australia I felt I had the basic concept under control, you bathe on a stool with a shower head and a bucket of water making sure to remove all of the soap before getting in the hot tub. So with this valuable knowledge I dropped the daks and went in. Once in two other blokes in there hardly took any notice and I went about my business. When I was about to get in the hot tub one of the blokes grunted and pointed at the sauna, this wasn’t in the guide book! I obliged and went in and sat down in the steam and to my relief was not followed in by the grunting man. I stayed in as long as I could stand and then exited to rinse before the hot tub. By now the grunting man had left and I was free to relax after a long day of sight seeing. Once I’d had enough I jumped out to rinse off before heading out to get changed for dinner.

However, as I sat down the friendly bloke who helped me work out what I was meant to be doing in the locker room earlier arrived and walked over and started to scrub my back, with soap again (obviously he thought I had just sat down or was really dirty EH) not wanting to be rude I said thanks and then washed off the soap ready to leave. As I stood up ready to go he grunted and pointed to the hot tub and so in I went, again! By this stage I was so hot I must have looked like a tomato. In broken English I was told to open the door and stand in the cold air blowing past the 9th floor balcony next to the bath house. As I stood there the friendly Japanese bloke kept waving me to go out on the balcony, being a modest Aussie I did so with a towel wrapped around my waist so as not to scare the peak hour traffic driving by below. The traffic didn’t worry him, he joined me out there in all his glory and started waving to the passing traffic! Being very diplomatic and not wishing to cause an incident I lost my modesty and also waved to the traffic driving below. Then quickly got out of there before being arrested and deported…

The remainder of our trip to Japan involved taking the Yamanote line around to Shinjuku, Shibuya, Uneo and Tokyo checking out parks, shopping centre and tourist sights. We made it to Roppongi and ate rammen and visited the Tsukiji fish markets on the last day where there was tuna taller than Emily being carved up.

Emily excited about cherry blossums!