After our delicious meal we walked about 30 minutes to a shrine called Fukusenji. The shrine was deserted and reminded me of Togakushi shrine in Nagano. A staircase led to a beautiful gate or tower that was painted white and bright vermilion, then led down a beautiful cedar lined pathway to a red bridge. We then walked up the hill to the layered pagoda .

There were no other human footprints in the snow, just animal ones. We then walked back to our accommodation which took about an hour, and it started to snow pretty heavily as we walked through the vast fields leading to our hotel in the country side of Iwate Japan.

We were very snow covered as we went to the counter of our hotel with our shoes to get a shoe locker key. We tried to express that we need to get our room key, but the room keys are not numbered, so we had a hard time expressing our room name to the staff. I took a photo of the emergency escape map with our room name on it and then showed it to the staff, that seemed to work, but then they wanted us to pay for the room… the problem was that my credit card was in the room we didn’t have access to. Eventually we were able to express this to the staff, and they allowed me to have the key to go get my credit card and pay. It was awkward, but it would get more awkward later on…. The staff is super lovely and try so hard, but there is zero English spoken here in rural Tono Iwate, and my Japanese is very limited and certainly sounds like a caveman is trying to communicate. 

We went down to have a bath in the onsen to warm up after our long cold walk. The onsen was very full. I had to wait to use the shower station (that you use before getting in the bath). When I finally got a station to shower at, the lady next to me sprayed me directly in the face. I sat in the water for 20 minutes or so, with 15 other people (and kids splashing around). I got out of the onsen and had to wait again for a bathing station to rinse off. A little old lady let me use her bathing station.  People tend to leave their personal items at the stations when they are in the bath… so the stations aren’t really occupied, just claimed by toiletries etc. being placed there. If you would have told a younger me that I would be sitting naked next to an elderly Japanese woman, scrubbing myself and sitting on a tiny plastic stool, I wouldn’t have believed you. In all honesty you don’t have time to feel uncomfortable being naked with strangers, there is a lot going on in a public bath. I met Jives outside the bath area in the common room and we had a small kirin together from the vending machine as kids played ping pong. A young boy got hit in the face by a ball..

We then went back to our room to wait for dinner time. We assumed that because there were menus with prices outside of the restaurant, that we could go in and eat like any restaurant. As soon as we went into the restaurant, the server lady looked panicked. We tried to leave saying we didn’t need to eat, but she kept talking quicker and louder and I had a complete anxiety meltdown. We kept trying to leave but the lady really wanted to accommodate us. We couldn’t understand anything and kept apologising. We then went back to our room but the receptionist lady came to our room to try to explain something to us about the restaurant. Again, I thought we had expressed that we were sorry and did not need to be accommodated, but minutes later the same lady from the restaurant came knocking on our door. I had never had so much anxiety in my life. I couldn’t go to the restaurant now, we had made such a mistake. I was literally paralysed with anxiety in the room. Jives was upset with me because he had to speak to the various staff members. He wanted to just go and eat because the staff had been so nice to accommodate us. I tried to get him to go alone, I just couldn’t seem to express that my anxiety had made it impossible for me to leave our room ever again. I realise after the fact that this doesn’t seem rational, but in moments of intense anxiety I don’t have the ability to do anything at all but panic. I felt terrible and still do (can anyone relate to this?)