Family Fun - Japan Style

It's the day after Christmas. The boys are on Christmas break from school, so what do you do to have fun as a family here in Japan? Well, a five minute walk from our apartment is an onsen, a hot spring resort. Usually when we have gone, we just go for the bath, but this time we decided to take our time there and take in some of the other amenities.

When you come in, you put your shoes in a little locker, hand the key to the front desk, and they hand you a little bracelet with a bar code on it. From then on, anything you like you can charge by scanning the bar code. Our first stop was the baths. This onsen has a great selection of baths. After washing, you can enjoy the regular hot baths, the various jet baths, mineral baths, and even a variety of outdoor baths (which are great fun to get to when its cold out). Outside, in addition to the large, natural rock pool, there are individual bowl shaped tubs, and even a large flat stone with a thin film of hot water running down it that you lay on (with a stone pillow for your head). Personally, I like to get in a bath and just sit for a while, but Xavier wants to experience them all, so I spend a lot of time travelling from bath to bath.

Some of the other amenities include a cold bath (I'm not a big fan), a sauna, and even massage services.

After the bath, we donned our "onsen wear," a kind of cross between pajamas and kimono that they provide, and headed down to the restaurant where we enjoyed a delicious Japanese dinner.

Christy, Willem and Terence all needed haircuts, so we headed up to the hair salon next. While we waited for our names to be called, we all relaxed in lounge chairs and either watched the big screen TV or read books. Once we were neatly trimmed, we headed back to the baths for another soak.

When we were done we tossed our onsen wear into the laundry bins at the exit and headed down for a last ice cream cone before we walked back to our apartment, clean, coiffed, and relaxed.

In spite of all that we did, there still are a lot of things available to do at the onsen that we didn't try. For an extra charge you can get a different set of onsen wear that gives you access to some other areas with extra baths and amenities. Also available are various massage options and some traditional medicine.