Glimpses of Japan Local - in JEnglish

  I spent the morning exploring the   Kan-nawa   district, and the weather seems nice. I thought, why not take the  Beppu Tsurumi-dake  Ropeway and go up to a higher place? I can hear people speaking Chinese, Korean, and some other languages here. Yesterday, I saw someone praying with a mat laid out between the hedges in the parking area. It's amazing how people from all over the world can go wherever they want freely. One of the things that elderly people can be grateful for is the senior citizen discount. The round-trip fare for the  Beppu Tsurumi-dake  Ropeway is 1,700 yen (1,800 yen for adults). I'm not fond of heights, but oh well. It's starting to move! It's going up rapidly. We passed by a descending ropeway gondola on the way, but it was going at an incredible speed! Wow, it's fast! And then, an announcement: "You might have thought that the descending gondola is fast, but the speed of going up and down is the same." So, we were pulled up by th...

Looks like I woke up a bit too early. I'll take a morning bath, wake myself up, and then head out. Maybe I'll try eating  "jigoku-mushi"  (steamed dish) after a long time. At the  Kan-nawa  hot spring treatment inn, you can eat whatever you like, whenever you like, from the inn's hot spring steam pot, but this time I have to choose from the prepared ingredients. The ingredients provided used to be simpler, but it seems like the service style has changed. I used to like eating cabbage, bean sprouts, and pork steamed with  ponzu  sauce on top. But it seems like they don't provide that basic option here. I was given a timer and set it according to the ingredients. Now I just have to wait! ：：：：：： With a friend from Melbourne, Australia I stayed at the old-fashioned hot spring inn  "Futabaso"  for a few nights. We bought vegetables, seafood, meat, sausages, eggs, etc. from the supermarket, chopped them up, steamed them, and enjoyed them while making so...