Nagano: Bathing, Monkeys, and an old Olympic Village

     Hello all! March has lighted upon Kanazawa and I can begin to feel springtime in the breeze (along with some smog which they SAY comes from Beijing). Last weekend we drove to Nagano Prefecture with some good friends and enjoyed one last wintry adventure. Nagano is in the heart of Japan and due to its higher elevation, it sees lots of snow even in March.

Nagano Prefecture in red. Ours is the peninsular one to the west.

     Shibu village, where we stayed overnight, is a famous hot springs locale. In fact, there were nine different baths scattered around the town, which we gained access to with our hotel key. Now, in case you don't know, Japanese bathe naked in public baths. The guys and girls have separate bathing facilities, but other than that, it's pretty much a free-for-all. It's a strange concept for westerners, but I've become a big advocate for Japanese onsens. They are wonderfully relaxing and even healing, or so many people claim.

     We spent our Saturday morning hopping around these different baths. Turns out, the psoriasis-curing bath and the chronic gout-curing bath felt about the same. But no complaints! Well, except that some of the baths were too hot to enter. Those hot springs are no joke! Ouch!

Each bath was fairly petite and no frills, like this one.

     After getting nice and pruny, we headed off to Jigokudani, a tourist park where snow monkeys roam wild and, as of circa 1960, enter the natural hot spring pools to warm up during the bitter winter. They watched humans doing it long enough that they caught on; I guess the expression "monkey see, monkey do" actually does have scientific roots. Oddly enough, this place is crazy popular among foreigners, but not so much among Japanese. When I mentioned to my coworkers where I was planning to go, many shrugged ambivalently. Daniel told one of his coworkers and her response was, "Ha! Every ALT at this school has visited that park. Foreigners LOVE it!"

     Despite such accusations, I was still feeling rather hesitant about visiting a park full of these shrieking, feces-flinging, greedy little faux humans. Monkeys are terrifying, y'all.

     Ultimately, it wasn't so bad. It was frigid in Nagano, so I didn't last long against the cold, but the monkeys were pretty fascinating to watch. They didn't pay any attention to their gawking/
photographing human counterparts, and they seemed completely in their element (and maybe even just a tiny bit cute) eating snow and bathing in the hot springs.

Are you gonna eat that?

Bathin'.

Daniel makes fun of me for the number of times I accidentally take a video instead of a picture. Welp, this one turned out for the best, I'd say. 

I'll refrain from making a "there's another monkey" joke.

Also, you sports fans out there might remember that the winter Olympics were held in Nagano in 1998. So what happens to an Olympic village after the Olympics, you might ask? By the looks of things, not much. On a Saturday afternoon, we were the only tourists in sight. The arenas and amphitheaters still appear to be used for sports meets, and a small museum has been installed in the "M-Wave" arena where figure skating was held, but it was spookily quiet. Here's a shot of the rink:

All right, that's all for now! More posts to come when we visit Tokyo Disneyland in a few weeks with Daniel's mom! Woot!