Kobe

Today was so much fun, but it was also completely exhausting. We were on the go from 7 in the morning until close to 10 at night.

Today we did a bunch of stuff, like walking through a forest, visiting the world's longest suspension bridge, visiting an aquarium with a dolphin show (got soaked!), and finally, visiting an onsen - public bath up in the mountains. It was raining all day, but it was still fun.

First, we went to an Arboretum in the mountains. Unfortunately, most of the flowers were not in bloom yet, but here are a few pictures. While I was there I bought a cute carved wooden owl to use as a bookend when I get back to Utah.

These first pictures are from the Shinrin Arboretum at Mount Rokko. The main flowers weren't in bloom yet, so most of my pictures are of other things I thought were cool. I think the above picture gives you a feel for what the walk was like: a beautiful tree-lined path that led to all sorts of cool places.

These are some of the koi from the lotus pond. It tells you how many there were that I was able to get this many in one photo. They were also really big.

Pretty lotus pond.

Me in front of one of the flowering bushes. I thought these flowers were cool - they are little star shapes.

Some of the blossoms in front of the stone path. I really like this photo.

For those of you that can't read Japanese, this store name is basically Aaah! The building itself is nothing out of the ordinary, and there was no sort of clue to led me know what they might sell in this kind of store.

These next pictures are from our trip to the aquarium. We saw all sorts of cool fish and listened to the Japanese people saying how delicious they all looked. We even got to see a dolphin show. We got really good seats by sitting in the middle of the wet zone. See the second picture for me being wet. My pants were saturated, but my shirt mostly escaped. Thank goodness I was not wearing jeans!

This is a picture of me petting sharks. Much safer than the scorpion petting zoo, in case you were wondering.

Ok. Now it is time to describe the last part of my day: the onsen. Onsens are hot springs/public baths up in the mountains with beautiful scenery all around. Public bath=no clothes. They are divided into a section for the men, and a section for the women. We got our locker keys on wristbands at the front desk, and split into the two groups. I was also given two towels - a bath towel to dry off with, and a very small towel to cover myself with. Very small.
I won't lie, it was seriously awkward at first. It helped a lot that I did not have my glasses and couldn't see well. After a little while I got more used to it, and ended up having fun. There were a bunch of different pools, so I went around to most of them. I spend most of my time in a large sitting pool that had a bunch of boulders and a waterfall. I also almost fell asleep in a shallow pool meant for lying down. Unfortunately, most of the pools were way hotter than I would like. I was never able to find a pool that was truly cold, so that was a bit of a disappointment.
It wasn't that bad once I got used to it, but I don't know if I will go again, mostly because it gave me a massive headache to go without glasses for that long while trying to look at scenery.

After we got out of the baths, we all ate dinner. Their serving size was massive. No joke. Each portion would probably have served three people. The size of a bowl of kitsune udon was the size of a rather large mixing bowl. I got donburi, and it was delicious.