Japanese don’t cheat – Hiro the English Speaking Guide

Lettie came home.

At this hotel we have separate rooms. It is a tiny room with a tatami bed. It was super comfy. I am surprised at how comfy that little teeny mattress is.

We woke early to go to Nara for the day. So up and at it. By early I mean 6.30 which of course is not early at all but feels like it. I’m concerned that my sleeping habits are all out of whack.

The trip was non descript so obviously easy peasy. We dropped our bags in a locker at the station and went to the info booth to get a map. Now I don’t usually buy into this but the elderly lady at the booth seemed so kind and generous and sincere that we decided to do the FREE English guide walking tour…everyone knows how this usually ends…. But wait this is Japan.

After getting detailed instructions on where to go to meet out guide after swiftly getting lost we finally get back on track. Our guides name was Hiro and he was awesome! With out a doubt we saw more and learned more in our 5 hours with Hiro than we would on our own. I learned that a Pagoda was a grave. You probably knew this but I didn’t. we saw the oldest Lantern in Japan and the biggest bronze statue in the world. its a massive Buddha.

The Japanese original religion is Shinto but Buddhism has been widely accepted and many people follow both. They have Shinto services for happy times and Buddhist or the sad occasions.

After our tour Hiro took us to the station to get our tickets for Mt Fuji. here we learned it was going to take 6 hours of pretty much constant travel to get there. Sigh.

He then took us to the supermarket to get food for our trip. When we got our food we paid at the checkout and then you walk back through the supermarket to the exit. I mentioned I thought it strange that you purchase your stuff and return through the shop and Hiro just looked at me and said the most fitting thing to sum up Japan…”Japanese don’t cheat”

Naturally we gave Hiro a small token of our gratitude but obviously what we gave him was nowhere near what his time was worth.

So our trip to Mt Fuji was on its way. Luckily I had scored a place to stay straight across from the train station so it was super easy.

I wanted Lettie to write a paragraph about her adventures at this hostel but the time just got away from us. Basically what happened was when we went to have showers we saw the Japanese bathroom and it looked super enticing. A great lightening bolt of inspiration hit me and we decided to use the awesome looking stainless steel spa. Being the prudes we are we quickly ran back to our dorm to get our swimmers.

Lettie got caught up with some texting so I continued back to change into my swimmers. Once I did that then went to check out the spa. It was so hot I had absolutely no chance of getting in there. It would have basically been a Summer soup in minutes. I made the executive decision to abort this ill conceived plot. As I exited the bathroom I called down to Lettie (rather pointlessly) to abort. As I waited for Lettie another girl came along so I decided to have a shower and Lettie would be able to work it out.

The rest of the story is Lettie’s perspective to the thing that happened. She got into her swimmers and made her way to the bathroom. In she strolls all hyped for the bath with a massive “Hey Summer” straight to a stark naked girl taking a Japanese shower. This was mortifying for Lettie and the most hilarious thing ever for me. Lettie excused herself and the girl said that it was ok that it’s a communal area.

I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my super comfy bed…

Off to Mt Fuji morra.

~ by summontherun on June 8, 2013.