Mental Health Weekend

I am hopelessly behind. It's clear by now. The things that I am about to tell you happened over a week ago ... but it might be a story worth telling.

The company was about to have it's yearly "Mental Health Weekend" - a chance to relax at an Onsen, that is, a Japanese hot spring, and let the mind unwind. Good dinner, bathing in the hot spring, some sort of party and sketching classes was on the menu. "Mental health" ... yeah, right. "Mental Weekend" is more like it.

The bus ride took about two hours, and we were steadily going higher up in the mountains. After a while it looked like wilderness ... well, almost. If one forgot about the power lines and other signs of humans being around. It's all relative, ya know, but for Japan I this might have been wilderness.

We arrived at the Minakami Onsen, a fairly large hotel built around a hot spring. The first thing to do was a lecture about something - this was friday afternoon, and the company had to make it seem as if we were working. But me and the other two foreigners there were free to roam - since we wouldn't understand the lecture, it being in Japanese and all, nobody really cared. We chose to stroll around the little city that was Minakami - strangest thing, I wouldn't have thought there were cities like it in Japan.

The town was mostly falling apart. We walked from one depressing building to the next, from an outdoor pool with green water to a pedestrian bridge that was closed because the wooden boards that made up the gangway were rotten. We found a house that was about to fall out onto the street, and most certainly would have already had not someone used two metal poles to prop it up. Check the pictures. Finally, we just bought a couple beers and some snacks and sat down on a bench and relaxed for a bit.

We got back to the hotel just when the lecture was over. Time to hit the hot spring! First, to the hotel room, switch to yukata (a thin kimono) with a warmer jacket over. Then down to the two pools with water straight from the spring ... it was hot indeed. As we were sitting there, slowly boiling, one of the employees came by with a thermometer, checking the temperature. So I asked, and the larger, cooler pool, was forty degrees - the smaller one was 49. I tried the small one as well, but I couldn't make myself put more than my legs in there. Hot, hot, hot.

Then dinner. In a large hall loads of small tables were lined up, and behind each one. a leg-less Japanese chair was placed. We all had one table each, filled with strange but yummy Japanese foods. Beer and sake was served as well, of course.

After the dinner it was party time. It is always fun to see what happens to the usually so well behaved and well mannered Japanese when they drink and party ... I swear, it's not the same people! There was basically unlimited alcohol there, of all sorts and kinds. Plus loads of snacks - some more normal, like potato chips or wasabi peas, and others more unusual, like dried squid (which was actually not so bad at all). Or cheese-sticks with fish on the outside. And then there were karaoke, of course.

The party went on until late. After the hall that we were partying in closed, a bunch of us went up to someones hotel room and kept the party going. Sometimes it seemed as if an experiment was being carried out - "how much can a westerner really drink?" Our glasses were always filled, and not only that, there were a few people who insisted on trying to keep up with us foreigners in the drinking race ... most entertainingly, a man who is a vice-president at the company. We took pictures, he looked at it and exclaimed "But I'm a vice president! I must look respectable!" and then he laughed and drank more. :-)

It was, on the whole, a very tough weekend ... I gave up on the party around 3:30am (hey, I was at least the last foreigner standing), and then it was up around 8 to get breakfast and then go to sketching class. There's not much to say about that ... most of Saturday kinda went by in a bit of a haze. I finally got home around 5pm. And then it was just about time for the next party ... but that's a different story.

Oh, and there are some pictures here.