Nanpuso Hotel - Part II

Dinner at the Nanpuso Hotel was spectacular! Obviously at this point on our trip we had already eaten our fair share of delicious Japanese food including sushi, yakitori and soba, but tonight was going to be something special! Tonight we were going to be feasting on more traditional Japanese fare, sampling a little bit of almost everything you could think of. Fresh sashimi, shrimp and vegetable tempura, charcoal broiled whole fish and our own personal little seafood hot pot just to name a few. As usual, all of the food was presented beautifully and they even served us a little plum wine to wash everything down.

Being the very important person that he is, Dean's name was put up in LIGHTS to let everyone know to stay clear of his personal private banquet room! They even spelled his name correctly in English! Here's a picture of Dean, his Mom and Matt in front of our banquet room before dinner.

All of us sat on the floor, with our food served to us on our own individual black lacquered trays. Looking at the above picture I still find it hard to believe that we were all lucky enough to be sitting together and enjoying this wonderful meal in Japan. Some of you may have noticed that Dean, Mark and Ryan are all dressed in regular clothes while the rest of us are in Japanese yukata. The reason for this is tied in to my comment from an earlier posting where I mentioned that thirteen of us instead of fourteen went up to the Nanpuso Hotel from Yumoto station. Again, I'll address this in a future posting.

As with almost every meal we had in Japan, Timmy and I ordered some sake with dinner. We then decided that this excellent meal deserved a toast to mark the occasion, hence the above picture. What made this toast even more meaningful was the fact that there was a picture of some cranes hanging in the background! There is a long entertaining story involving our onsen stay, cranes and our pal Richard. It's such a funny story (at least to me and Timmy) that it deserves it's own posting, which I plan to do some time in the near future.

So how do you end the perfect day at the onsen? Why, with a little snort of Johnny Walker Blue of course. A few of us who came up from Hawaii for this trip decided to buy a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue at the airport duty free shop before we left Hawaii. Most of us had never tried Johnny Walker Blue before, and we thought that it might be fun to bring the bottle along to the onsen for a little night cap.