When Kei and I got back from our wanderings (Pokemon Go update: I haven’t caught anymore shiny Ralts since that first one!) to find that corn has been served.  Hokkaido corn, by the way, is suuuuuuuuuuper sweet!  Like, seriously, it’s all sweet.  You know how, stateside, corn is kind of hit or miss in its sweetness level?  Well, three trips to Hokkaido (although I don’t remember eating any corn back in January) and its corn sweetness is 100% perfect so far.

The guy in the green shirt is Yoshi-kun.  He’s pretty drunk right now and, at the moment, is attempting to only speak in English.  For some reason, the delightful people in this crowd like to impose that restriction upon themselves.  I wonder if it’s to try and lessen some of the burden of the language barrier--take some of it off me?  Or maybe they do it when I’m not around, too.  Either way, it’s a nice change, it’s always amusing (I imagine my Japanese ramblings are just as amusing to them), and I appreciate it nonetheless.  Despite the age gap, these guys really give credence to the saying that age is nothing but a number.  I truly do think of them as my friends.

So, obviously, I couldn’t take any pictures once we were in the bath.  But omg this place was so much busier than the other onsen they took me to in January!  Granted, it was much later at night, and there was like, five feet of snow on the ground.  But still, we’re going from maybe 10 other women in the bath to about 50 women and children.

Tomo-san and I went to the outdoor bath first, which was fine with me!  In January, I kept overheating in the indoor baths--even in the lower temperature ones (all of the baths are separated at different temperatures)--and ended up spending the majority of my time in the outdoor bath.  That was so nice!  Whenever I started to overheat, I’d drape the upper half of my body over one of the rocks lining the bath and stick my hands in the snow.  Then, just when I started to get cold, I’d get back in.  The outdoor bath here, though, more decorative rocks lining the bath.  I didn’t get a good look at them, but they were mostly this pretty dark green.

After the bath, we went to one of the saunas.  She picked the salt sauna, where you literally rub salt all over your body and then sit there.  They’ve got a TV in there, too!  I didn’t last very long--maybe 10 minutes?  It was so hot in there that I could literally feel the sweat dripping everywhere.  There was a little shower right outside where we could rinse the remaining salt off when we were done.