Settling in and finding our first meal

After an exhausting trip we finally made it to the ryokan, that’s a traditional Japanese ‘inn’. We made this choise very consciously because we really wanted to save some money and we both don’t like big hotels with lots of rooms that are too small to turn your arse.

Persides; a hotel has some very fundamental drawbacks with which you must recon, like there is a closing of the doors after a certain hour. Our ryokan doesn’t, which makes it perfect for the jetlagging experiences.

At a ryokan the ‘rules’ are basicly like they are at a family home. At the entrance hall you will find shoes at the side and on the higher leveled floor, house slippers. When you are welcomed by the lady of the house, please be nice and don’t turn your back to her while you take off your shoes. After you’ve put on some slippers you will be led to your room to be explained about the workings of the house.

Basic things to remember are; be carefull with your luggage when moving about; most walls are finished with paper which makes them easily damaged by hard things like your luggage or wet hands etc. In your room the floor is made out of tatami, which means you will need to leave your house slippers outside your door and don’t drag any luggage over the tatami.

First thing we did when we settled in at two a’clock, was sleeping. We planned to go to the sunto later on but we woke up at nine, too late to go out and search for one. Bummer!

We hit the shower and finally left for some food rampage at half past eleven. We found a little noodle-bar on the main street that was still open. They have a machine with all kinds of choices but since we’re veggy we didn’t want to take any chances and asked politely if there was any NIKU in it. (meat)

It’s sure a VERY neccesary thing to at least know some hiragana, this will allow you to read some basic information that can heed you from disaster.

There is also a special thing called the syncronous flow of alternate energy information wich you can pick up with your internal radar. You can call it intuition, coïncidence, god’s favors or whatever you like, but it comes down to be open enough to allow for it to guide you and you don’t have to ask yourself too much questions about it. Just being aware of this flow of things brings you the things you need when they are required or when they are bound to happen.

These experiences can range from anything like finding your way trough the city or stumbling on the right kind of cable for the adapter which is hidden away in a cupbord under the tv set. Thanks to this we could charge the computer so we could post to our blog.

Then we went to sleep for the first night on a futon.