Date: 26 December 2014 Friday
12:30 PM Beppu Ropeway
We arrived at Beppu Ropeway next.
We bought the tickets and took the 1 PM ropeway up. The weather board said it was -4 and -2 degree Celsius earlier that morning so we estimated that it should be about 0 degree Celsius now.
Up we go!
The paths were covered with hardened snow.
We stayed for a while on Tsurumi mountain before going down. The ground was quite slippery and we concluded that it was too dangerous to climb to the peak with R.
My little darling.
14:10 PM Aeon
We dropped by one of the Aeon malls on the way back to our Ryokan.
Bought some food from the supermarket and had late lunch in the car.
We were back at the Ryokan early as we had booked a private open-air bath earlier. We chose to pay for a 50 minutes use of the private room because we were too shy to visit the public baths. Our initial plan was to take turns so 1 of us could take care of R while the other uses the bath. We didn’t know that the private room include a dry enclosed area and didn’t bring our cameras with us.
We went up to the rooftop hot spring counter and an old lady led us to one of the 4 private open-air baths. We entered a clean, dry and warm room, equipped with a sink counter and a long bench. There is also a toilet in the room. A clear sliding door separates the room with the open-air bath + showering area. The outdoor bathing area has a great view of the ocean.
JR went out first into the bath while I took the duty to take care of R. It was a tough job because R was screaming and crying non-stop. She wanted to go out into the bath with JR. Since the bath was not too hot, JR agreed that R could have a short soak together. Both R and I joined JR in the bath until she got sick. I guessed she got a bit unwell for jumping and floating around too much in the water. We forgot that she just had her milk just before coming up! I used my bare hands to catch her vomit but some little bits still got into the bath. Luckily we could change the water in the bath, but we didn’t have the time to refill the entire bath, so I continued to soak in the “dirty” water while JR showered R. It was disgusting but since I would be bathing later, it didn’t matter… We drained all the bath water after that and cleaned up the bath before leaving.
18:30 PM Kaiseki (Traditional Japanese Multi-Course Dinner)
The menu – the courses were served to us all at once instead of 1 by 1. We had dinner at the same dining area at level 2 but this time we were given the Japanese style dining room. It sounded like a nice dinner, good food in a Japanese style ambiance room but it was not. We were freaking out throughout the whole meal because everything was within R’s reach. She ran around the room, exploring everything on the table. She toppled the sauce dish, dropped the pepper bottle, etc.
Nevertheless, it was a good dinner. We were really full after the heavy meal. We spent the rest of the night in our room watching Music Station, one of my favourite Japanese programme when I was younger…