Wednesday, August 9, 2017 Part Two

This day just keeps getting weirder and weirder!

I went down to take a shower and it became a community event. Five other women came in just as I was about done. This hotel only has room for three to shower at a time so two stood outside in the changing room waiting. The door to the part of the shower where you get dressed was left open and all that was covering the door was a half curtain. The hall in front of the shower was rather busy. Oh well, we are leaving in the morning and I won’t see them again.

Our bags finally showed up. We went down to dinner and saw they were by the front door. We carried them up to our room to find clean underwear as we only had our robes on. We felt a little exposed!

Dinner was another interesting event. Not sure what we were served. Nicole had a bug as some extra protein on top of her raw fish. It crawled around and entertained her. Good thing she doesn’t eat raw fish. One of the workers finally noticed it at the end of our dinner and got it.

The owner of the hotel is a little – shall we say – my way or the highway type of person. She came up to Nicole and dumped Nicole’s eggplant into her rice and loaded up Nicole’s chop sticks and handed them to her. She almost shoved them in her mouth.

She then came over to my side of the table and dumped the noodles out of my soup and did the same thing to me with my chop sticks.

Nicole took a bite of her prawn and immediately broke out into a sweat all over her body. Her face turned bright red. She thought it was because the room suddenly got hot so a few minutes later took another bite and the same thing happened. Thinking she had an allergic reaction and grateful it wasn’t worse.

The variety of toilets in Japan is impressive. This hotel only has one bidet and the rest are squatters. When one has walked lots of stairs in a day it seems a bit of a cosmic joke to have to use a squatter toilet. We are on the second floor and the bidet is on the first floor. Plenty of squatters on our floor though. Guess I will get to work my thigh muscles one way or the other.

I have had quite a time learning how to use a bidet. I have ended up with the back of my shirt wet more times than I can count. Oh the joys of international traveling.

Nicole and I were trying to decide what we would eat if we could. She wants pizza and I want cream cheese on oat bread toast.

We didn’t get turn down service that was to happen during dinner so now we get to figure out how to make up our futons. They are folded up against the wall and that is all we have had to sit on this afternoon.

You have to take your shoes off at the front door and put on one-size fits most slippers. When you go into the bathroom you have to change to toilet slippers. I want to wear different shoes tomorrow then what I had on today so I tried to carry my boots up to my room. The owner stopped me. She put them in a bag but wouldn’t let me carry them to my room. Not sure how I am going to get them packed in the morning. Maybe I’ll go down and sneak them up to my room during the night. The owner has to sleep sometime – right?

What a day! Certainly different from we had planned.