Stacey's Bodacious Japan Trip: Nagano and Niigata Return Trip Day 2

The next morning (1/29/17) I was in a very bad way. I had mixed my sugary drinks and I was paying for it. My entire morning was a cycle of trying to eat something and drink water and then throwing it back up because my body was having none of that. That day, even the very mention of gyoza was enough for me to get sick.

Here is a manhole cover for the quaint town. It shows a monkey enjoying an onsen.

After leaving the hostel, we drove to a section of town about ten minutes away and walked around the town. It was a nice, quaint little town. It was famous for having a lot of onsen. In about a square mile of town there were maybe twenty hot springs and foot baths dotted around the town.

A simple map of the nearby streets and locations of onsen and a shrine.

It also had a lot of fish street art.

We were walking around, and I wanted to try a public foot bath. While we were looking we came up on one and started removing our shoes. A woman hurried up and said that it was time to clean that one and that we couldn’t use it. Here is a picture of her cleaning the foot bath.

We continued down the street until we came to another foot bath. We took off our shoes and hung around for about twenty minutes. It was here that my body decided that hot water on my extremities was not the way to go and I had to barf. There was nowhere to go, so I leaned out of the footbath into a snow pile on the other side of a curtain and barfed in the snow. I buried it afterwards. Lol. My “friends” took pictures of my shame. (update: and then deleted them. So no embarrassing photo for you.)

We also ran into a cool shrine across from the footbath. You had to climb a set of steep stone steps to get to it, but it was beautiful!

On the way back we saw a beautiful ryokan. There was also a little monkey sitting on the roof.

One thing I love about japan is that they can do things like this and have very reasonable expectations that people will follow the honor code.

We walked back to our car and started driving back to Fukushima. The freeway passes right through Joetsu, Niigata, so I suggested that we stop at the Uesugi Kenshin Buddhist temple and Shinto shrine. I had already been there in September (see my Niigata trip posts from September 2016) and I thought my friends would like to see it as well.

When we arrived, everything was closed because of the cold winter season, but we were still allowed to walk around.

I showed my friends the Buddhist monk cemetery. It was covered in snow that was knee-high. We were the only ones up to that point to want to walk around the cemetery, as our footprints were the only ones that had marked the snow. It was slow-going and difficult to walk through the snow, but it was a lot of fun.

Cormac took the initiative and went first, creating footsteps in the snow so that Felipe and I could have an easier time. It was super nice of him. I lead them around to the various monuments that were dotted around the cemetery. They looked so nice in the snow!

As we were heading back down the cemetery, we saw a hill that would cut our trip in half and get us to the bottom quicker. So we decided to sled down the hill on our coats/butts. It was super fun!

We then drove for three minutes up to the Shinto shrine where the large Uesugi Kenshin statue is. We walked around for a few minutes, taking in the scenery.