Thanksgiving weekend

Thanksgiving weekend was epic, which is probably why I’ve been considering for so long how to condense the story. Well,…I’ve never been one for condensed anyway. So, as usual, brace yourselves!

After school on “Thanksgiving Friday,” the teachers from my junior high school who were able to sneak away for an overnight trip (primarily male teachers [not as much responsibility for caring for the family…not my words!], save myself and the female Social Studies/Special Needs teacher), headed out for the annual teachers’ hot spring weekend. At 4pm, my usual finish time, I ran across the street to my apartment to quickly swap my school bag for my overnight bag, and headed back to school for the 4:30pm trip departure. I wasn’t gone more than 15 minutes. However, when I walked back onto school grounds, I saw a very large group of teachers milling about at the far end of the sports field, which was quite odd. There were hedges in my way along most of the path leading up to the school, so I couldn’t really see what was going on. As I neared, I could see a tall, male student being supported by one of the teachers. In the 15 minutes I was off school grounds, on the only day of the year when the majority of the teachers needed to vacate the school ASAP to head out for some much needed relaxation, one of the 3rd year (JHS) students had gone and broken his leg, apparently by trying to climb up the back of the steps on the side of the gym, which happens to be over the wood pile kept as winter fuel for the heating stove in the teachers room. Yeah, not difficult to picture what happened, right? Off the top of my head, I can’t even remember the last time a student seriously injured themselves at school…even with kendo and judo classes underway in P.E.! Apparently whatever he did was bad enough to need surgery right away, and was laid up in the hospital for awhile.

After his grandfather drove him off to the hospital, the school nurse and other non-participants in the hot spring weekend were able to do the follow-up with the student and grandfather, leaving the rest of us free to head out. I was told which car I was to ride in- the “crazy” English teacher’s, along with the slightly crazy male Social Studies teacher and the other female teacher participating in the trip. As I fell into the car, I asked where we were going (hadn’t really known up to that point, just agreed to go 3 months prior), and the answer sounded familiar to me. It wasn’t until we actually arrived in the town that I realized I’d been there just last February with a group of foreign teacher friends. You know you’ve been somewhere awhile when, out of sheer coincidence, you start going to places you’ve already been. Destination: Ikaho, famous hot spring town.

So, what happens at these hot spring hotel overnights is the night of arrival there is a pre-arranged 2-hour dinner party (“enkai”) where we eat way too much food (including personal soup/stew pots that cook in front of you while you devour everything else on your tray) and almost everyone drinks too much beer and Japanese alcohol. One year (not this year), one of the teachers brought their Wii, and we had team Wii challenges (I’m no good at it in real-life, but, go figure, I’m pretty talented at Wii-fishing….however can’t race cows for the life of me [failing my Iowa heritage there]). But the best part is that there is always something like 30-90 minutes between arrival and the start of the enkai, during which time the men usually take a dip in the hot spring and come to the enkai wearing their Japanese “bathrobes”….which is pretty much all they wear the entire time they are in the hotel. There are some hot spring towns that allow hotel guests to walk around anywhere in the town in these bathrobes, so you see them in restaurants, shops, on the street, etc. I just get the biggest kick out of it when I do see people wandering around like that. It’s also funny for me to see, for example, the school principal wearing only a bathrobe at the dinner party, anytime you see him in the hallway, and at breakfast the next day, right up until we chase him back into his room just before we’re supposed to check out so we can get the sight-seeing underway.

Post-enkai is free time. Sometimes there is karaoke to be done, but lots of teachers enjoy taking advantage of the hotel amenities, such as massage, and taking one or more late-night dips in the hot spring (helps keep you warm prior to curling up for the night). And there is almost always some teachers’ room designated for game playing. This year was the Chinese game ‘mahjong,’ which apparently lasted until 3am (which is probably when the nihon-shu and beer ran out).

I always forget about the hotel amenities and forget to bring enough money to cover the extra luxuries, having paid for the rest of the trip in advance. But this year I remembered (yay!), and when the other female teacher decided to try out the “hot rock-slab room” and asked me if I wanted to go too, I could say yes. Finally! She’d never done it before; I’d done it once. That one time was at a local onsen, and the “hot rock room” was a large (sauna-esque) room (maybe 10 or so people could fit very comfortably in it lying down), where basically you just lay down (that time we were wearing shirts and pants that looked like they were made from burlap bags) on the slabs of heated rock that constitute the floor. The time I’d done it before it was SUPER relaxing. Neither the room nor the rock slabs were too hot, they had music playing and an attendant was keeping track of the time for us so we didn’t have to worry about staying in too long. This hotel had private rooms, which was nice, and we wore Japanese bathrobes into the hot rock room, which was fine. But the rock slab could have literally been on fire for as hot as they were. I couldn’t even stay in for the full 15 minutes you’re supposed to before taking a break, because my butt was burning. So, like wimp, I vacated after maybe 8 minutes. After the other teacher came out as well for the recommended 5 minute break between 15 minute hot rock slab laying sessions, as we were relishing our ice waters, she picked up the instructions paper for the first time. We had been late for our appointment (had to rush through the enkai food and make our apologies for leaving early…not that the other teachers really cared at that point because most of them were pretty close to being 3-sheets to the wind already), so had basically rushed into the room, changed, and jumped into the rock room. Had we read the instructions paper before our first session, we would have learned that the extra towel they provided for us in the pile with our bathrobes was for placing over the rock slab to provide an extra layer of insulation. We would have also learned that it is recommended to lay on your stomach for half the time, then turn over onto your back, but you can lay whatever way is most comfortable for you…..instead of on your back the full 15 minutes trying to light your butt on fire. Also, when I called the first session quits after 8 minutes, and banished myself to my changing room chair, while contemplating how the heck I was going to get through a full 90 minutes of 15-5-15-5 in-and-out sessions, I happened to glance at the wall next to me. Low and behold, there were 3 different control panels on the wall, and I could make out that one was to control the air temperature in the rock slab room, and another was to control the heat of the rock slabs themselves. You have no idea how happy that moment was for me. I snuck a few quick turns of the dials before the other teacher came out. I don’t know if the damage had already been done and I was as hot as I was going to get regardless of how much I turned down the heat on the slab from there on out, or if turning those knobs (that I assumed were doing what I wanted them to do), OR if spreading the heat along 4 sides of my body instead of just one actually did the trick, but the rest of the sessions felt more manageable.

We made it through the entire 90-minutes, but if we each had 100-yen for every time we each said, “Man, it’s hot in here!”…. By that time it was probably close to 10pm, and after an hour and a half of lying around sweating, it was time to hit the hot spring. Late night hot springs at these hotels are the best, because usually no one else is there. I love going out to the outdoor hot spring pool to watch the stars, gaze at the outlines of the surrounding mountains, and watch the steam play in the brisk, late-autumn air. This particular hot spring had one indoor pool, one outdoor pool and one half-outdoor pool, the latter of which had a waterfall pillar in the middle and the far end had Jacuzzi-like jet-streams that are kind of rare in Japanese hot springs, but man was that a find! Luckily there were (the world’s BEST) massage chairs (seriously, I kept checking out the price hung on the back of the chair, thinking, “I could manage that….”) in part of the hot spring changing area that the other teacher was happy to spend time in, because I was NOT interested in leaving the Jacuzzi-type pool.

When we were finally able to drag ourselves away from the Jacuzzi and massage chairs, we were then faced with the challenge of finding our room again (the hotel really was like a maze, and if the other teacher hadn’t been there to read signs for me, I would have had to sleep in a random hallway somewhere) while simultaneously trying avoid the male teachers on the way back to our room so we wouldn’t get dragged into their drinking/game-playing party (Japanese people can be really quite persistent when they are drunk, and it’s difficult to say no to someone like the Principal!). It really was a challenge because you never knew where the might pop up.

The next day, Saturday, we were all back in our allotted meal room by 7am (even the mahjong players, surprisingly) for the scheduled breakfast, followed by a last visit to the hot spring, check-out, and a little walking tour around the town for the remainder of the morning. Ikaho has a hill of steps, kind of like the Spanish Steps, I suppose, for which it is famous, and, naturally, lined with tourist shops. The town has a number of specialties, as you can imagine, one of which being “onsen manjyu” or “hot spring cakes.” Outside is dough and inside is usually some sort of red or white bean paste (sweet), steamed in the hot spring water (which flows everywhere in town). The onsen manjyu shops are small, and you can watch the workers in the manjyu kitchen making the manjyu through the windows looking in from the street. Don’t ask me why, but it really is a unique experience, and the manjyu they make in Ikaho are very tasty in a way I haven’t found replicated elsewhere! There was another must-stop-at shop for one of the teachers who was dying to buy sour dried plums. This same shop also happened to sell the bark of a certain tree that a few of the teachers explained to me as “drugs for cats.” I thought it was funny that it was the actual bark of a tree that’s the drug…I kept picturing ‘Treebeard’ as a cat-marjuana pusher. And another famous spot gave passers-by an opportunity to taste hot spring water fresh from the ground. There’s a little stand with two spigots, one for regular spring water, one for hot spring water. The hot spring water taste reminded me of my summer camp days, a wonderful mixture of metals and sulfur. Yum yum.

Lunch was spent at a famous temple & udon (thick, white, flour noodles) area, then we headed back to Tokigawa. All in all, the trip was less than 24-hours, which was fine for me, because I had promised an American friend in Tokyo who was moving back to the U.S. that I would drive to Tokyo that same afternoon to pick up some things of his he was getting rid of. The earlier I got back from the teacher trip, the earlier I could head into Tokyo.

This was definitely more of a madness sort of idea than anything else, and not just because I was just coming back from the teacher trip right before, but because I was DRIVING INTO TOKYO. I had driven to this friend’s Tokyo apartment once before; when he moved from the town near me to Tokyo, I drove him and a load of his stuff in. However, that time he was in the car with me, as was another friend of ours, both of whom read and speak Japanese MUCH better than I do (even so, we did get lost twice then as well). But, I figured I’d done it once, and it wasn’t actually that far from my house (if you make it in the prescribed amount of time, it’s only a 45 minute drive!). I had the old instructions, had also found new instructions, and for whatever reason I was feeling pretty confident about my chances. I was looking forward to the adventure.

…I did make it there and back, but the amount of time it took me to make the round-trip journey will go with me to the grave. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except Japanese roads, surface or freeway, are not made to sympathize with mistakes. You can’t just go around the block, or get off at the next exit, go back over the overpass, and head in the right direction. It’s impossible to explain exactly how Japanese roads work, but I’ll just say this- because Japanese roads are the way they are is why 98% of Japanese drivers themselves have GPS navigation programs installed in their cars, whether the car came with the GPS system originally or not. My car does not have a GPS navigation system. Simply the fact that I made it there and back without it, barely being able to read kanji, has instilled a feeling in me, even more than bungee jumping did, that if I could do that, I can do pretty much anything...as long as I have enough time to muck around a lot.

Anyway, here are the highlights: The first time I got off the freeway heading into Tokyo (yes, I did say THE FIRST TIME), I turned one stoplight too early. In my attempt to turn around to get back on the same road from which I took the wrong turn, there were ABSOLUTELY NO opportunities to turn right back towards that road, which is when I found myself driving onto the entrance ramp to the freeway I had just exited. Probably the worst thing about this situation is that the freeways in Japan are all toll. So I was literally going to pay for my mistake. Twice. So, I arrived at the freeway entrance toll area, took my ticket, and drove to the first exit toll area I saw, where, when handing over my ticket to the very nice old man who was manning the booth, I told him that I’d made a mistake, accidentally gotten back on the freeway I’d just gotten off of, and really wanted to be going to the exit I had just come from. I’m not quite sure how I was able to make myself understood, but between me probably looking extremely pathetic and the Japanese code of politeness, he nodded, wrote down my license plate number, cancelled my toll charge, and gave my toll ticket a special stamp that apparently was going to indicate to the next toll operator that I shouldn’t pay there either. This particular toll area actually had a bit of a turn-around area, so I had unbelievably easy access to getting back to the proper side of the freeway. When I AGAIN arrived at the exit that my instructions told me to use, I went to the same toll booth, hoping that the lady there, who had seemed very kind the first time around, would remember that she just saw me a few minutes ago, and go along with the situation. She did, and hence saved me from paying the same tolls twice.

So, I finally got off the freeway, made my turn at the correct signal this time, and was doing really well again, until…..I came to the signal which, on my map had 4 possible turns towards the direction I was supposed to go, however, the road onto which I was supposed to turn did not seem to exist no matter how hard I studied the signs or how many times I drove through the intersection. Without being able to get onto this road, I had to start to improvise. This is where it really got interesting. I started making calculations for how to get onto the next-next road on the instructions from where I was without being able to follow the in-between road I couldn’t find. From this point on, I really have no idea how it all came together. The only idea I had in my head, was the ‘Tokyo-apartment friend’ telling me that if I headed toward an area of Tokyo called “Shinjuku,” that I’d be heading in the right direction. I kind of used that as my north star when I came across large road signs. Somehow I was able to deduce how to get to the section of the city that was part of my friend’s address, but the main road I was on wasn’t becoming as familiar as I had hoped.

At this point I stopped at a gigantic gas station on a very busy street corner. As I pulled in, 2 of the station attendants tried to guide me into a pump. I stopped the car in the middle of somewhere I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to be, rolled down the window and told them that I didn’t need gas, that I needed help figuring out where the hell I was. They looked a little bewildered, and I don’t blame them. One of the attendants kind of backed off at that point, but the other one took a look at the address I was trying to get to, and after a few minutes (by which time a small crowd of curious gas station attendants had formed on the far side of the car) he pointed me in the direction of a street that was perpendicular to the street I had been driving on. He told me to follow that road for about 20 minutes, turn right, and I’d be on the road where my friend’s apartment was located. I was incredulous that I was actually that close to where I needed to be, and that from the gas station it was so straight-forward to get to where I wanted to go. I did indeed find the road I needed, but I turned onto the street on the opposite side from my friend’s apartment building. Unfortunately, the road my friend’s apartment was on was a major road, down the middle of which ran a series of columns and ramps for an overpass. Hence, I literally had to drive 30-45 minutes before I found a signal at which I could make a u-turn. I had to do this twice, because the series of exits for the freeway, side roads and surface streets was so confusing, I was in the wrong lane the first time around.

After finally being able to pull into the alley parking next to my friend’s apartment building, it would have been great to have been able to just stay there that night instead of driving home through/from Tokyo in the dark. This had actually been my plan when I first decided to do embark on this insane adventure, but unfortunately the tennis tournament I was supposed to have participated in the weekend before had been cancelled because of rain, and rescheduled for that Sunday, i.e. the day after the Tokyo sojourn. And, oddly enough, the friend to whom this apartment around which Mandy’s driving adventure revolved wasn’t even at his apartment when I arrived. He was off entertaining a friend who had come in from Singapore. I let myself in with a key whose hiding place I knew, and it was another friend who was randomly in Tokyo for the day who came over to the apartment to keep me company and commiserate with me before I took off to try to get home again.

Anyway, my favorite part of loading up my friend’s belongings was the rug. I had told him a few weeks before that I was interested in taking his rug (to keep my feet from freezing in the winter when in the kitchen). However, he had forgotten, and had, just that morning, put the rug out on the sidewalk with the garbage. I wasn’t sure if the rug would actually fit in the car with all the other stuff I was loading up, but in the end, it did look like it would work. I had just put the final load of everything else in the car (which, as mentioned before, was parked in the alley next to the apartment building) and had decided to try to make the rug fit. So, picture this: It was dark, a little cold, and had just started to mist. A lone foreign female emerges from a dark alley, walks over to the garbage area in front of an random, Tokyo high-rise apartment building, grabs a large rug lying rolled up and ready to be tossed away, and disappears back into the alley toting the rug. I can only imagine how the scene looked to the 4 young guys in athletic track suits that were walking up the street towards the apartment building just as this scene played out.

Eventually, I headed back to Tokigawa, however, things went south right from the start. Following the instructions backward, even though I hadn’t been able to follow them forward, seemed like it might be a bit easier. First, I was supposed to get on a second freeway (that I never had the chance to use coming in) basically right outside my friend’s apartment building. I was able to do with relative ease, because I’d been able to observe the entrance ramp for the freeway many times as I was driving around in circles trying to get to the side of the road where the apartment was. However, once I got on that second freeway, I missed my exit, and had to turn around again. Although, this time I wasn’t lucky enough to not have to pay twice. I found my exit after I got turned back around (which involved a construction zone issue that made return to the freeway look impossible for a bit), BUT…the road onto which I was supposed to turn after exiting the freeway never seemed to materialize, so again, I found myself at a gas station, but not before finding myself sitting in a series of small side roads trying to figure out where I was and how to get turned back around, watching police cars drive by, wishing for the first time in my life that they would stop me (okay…second time in my life; the first being when my car got chained into that parking lot just a few months ago). At the gas station, the guy I talked to wasn’t quite as quick and helpful as the guy at the first gas station. He had no idea about the road I was looking for, but offered an alternative. He said that when he drives out toward one of the major cities near where I live, he usually takes this other surface road, and he pointed me in the direction of that road. Once again, I was completely off my driving instructions. He explained how to get so far, but from that point, I was on my own to figure out how to get to my town. So, I started driving, hoping I was familiar enough with the general area to be able to guess how to get back to my town. It was kind of fun driving around on empty, middle-of-nowhere side streets, getting to observe strange areas of Japan while they slept, improving my travel route.

Eventually I made it home. The next day, Sunday, I was up bright and early and headed to the tennis tournament run by the tennis club I play with sometimes on Sundays. I managed to make it through the tournament, despite being more than a bit exhausted. We played women’s doubles and mixed doubles, although it was a random draw tournament with more men than women, so you never knew when your name was going to be called or how many times. My women’s doubles partner and I won the women’s doubles part of the tournament, although if I fully explained exactly how the tournament worked, you’d agree with me that it’s a random fluke that we won, and really not a big deal. When I got home that evening, I basically rendered myself unconscious as soon as I sat down.

Thus endethed my Epic Thanksgiving Weekend.