Mon Sept 26, Kurokawa

We got up early and walked from our hotel to the Kokura station. We took a shinkansen to Hakata and then to Kumamoto. We were going to take a sight-seeing bus from there to Kurokawa, but we saw we could save some money and about an hour of our time by taking another train to Aso, and then intercepting an early one of those buses to Kurokawa. We picked up some horse meat bento lunches to eat on the way to Aso.




The reason Chika's face is all scrunched up in that last photo, was the lady on the train was telling people "顔を中央に寄せてください" which Chika says sounds more like "bring your face together in the middle", instead of "bring your faces closer together". The lady wasn't amused and told us to take another picture =\



Once we got to Kurokawa, a driver from our onsen was there to meet us. He took us to the information center where he suggested we get passes to try some of the other nearby onsens. He took our luggage and left us with some towels to use. We bought three passes each.



I told Chika I was interested in konyoku (baths that allow both women and men) so we went to two that had them. First was Shinmeikan that had two baths to try. One was in a cave, which was pretty interesting, and then instead of getting dressed to walk 15 feet, we just wrapped towels around us and went to the next one. On the way some other tourist from across the river whistled at Chika =) Then we went to Ikoi Ryoukan that was supposed to have tachiyu (a bath deep enough to stand in) but we found out that was only in the women-only bath. Then we sat outside and had onsen tamago and some homemade cider.



We saw a tsukemono shop and bought some to bring home. Then we made it back to the information center and called to have our driver come back and pick us up. We finally got up to the place we were staying, called Kiyashiki. We went in and they gave us some tea while we waited for someone to show us to our room.





While the guy was showing us around our room and telling us about the onsen, we found out that they have a family bath that you can reserve for 45 minutes that has a long shallow place to lay down in the bath called neyu. All the times to use it were already taken, though, except for the slot that had already started 10 minutes ago, so we took that one and hurried down to have at least 30 minutes to enjoy it.



Once our time was up, it was time to head to dinner. We had marbled beef yakiniku (the best food I had on the trip) called higogyuu (marbled beef is called shimofuri). We also had sakuraniku no tataki (seared horse meat). I made a bad Japanese pun about how it was delicious with out adding any sauce "何も付けてない、でも熱いよ、気だけ付けてください" ... don't worry about not understanding it ... it's not worth explaining.




We also had (what we think is) yamame roasted on a stick



Afterwards we went to the bar and had Moriizou and just relaxed for a bit.



Then we went back to our room and took a bath. Chika left much earlier than I did. I think I stayed out there until around 1am, and by the time I came back in, she had fallen asleep watching TV.