Day 9: Traveling to Tsumago and a night in the Ryokan

Well Yesterday we traveled all the way to Tsumago, it took us around 4 and a half hours to get there including a few very short toilet breaks on the way. While we were traveling we saw mountains everywhere, there were also many tunnels that we had to pass through, one was around 5km long!!!!!

When we at last reached the little village we went for a walk around the stalls that lined the street. There were wood places, restaurants, and souvenir shops. After looking around for a while we continued up the street to where there were no more stalls, when we reached this point we walked on for a bit longer and took many pictures of the dam that was near where we were staying.
After walking about for a while just enjoying the scenery we headed back to the car to get our back packs. We then headed over to the Hotel/Inn that we were staying at. it was Japanese of course, so we had to take our shoes off and put a pair of slippers on. If we wanted to go to the bathroom we had to take this pair of slippers of at the bathroom door and put a pair of bathroom slippers on. It was all very confusing but I think I did okay in the end. When we got up to our room it was already around half past four. Dinner was at 6 O'clock so we sat and read books for a while, then we got into our Yukatas ready for dinner.












It was amazing. The first course was fish that was pre gutted and we had to take all the bones out which was a great amount of fun. This was one of my favorite dishes as it tasted great as well as being fun.
Then we had another few dishes and then a really cool one where we watched our meat being cooked in front of us. This one was very delicious.
The next dish that I really enjoyed was a rice pattie thing on a stick covered in a sort of glaze thing which had soya sauce and nuts, which I couldn't taste on it. After a couple more things we had soba noodles, these are a very unappetizing colour, a purple-grey and were cold, also not a very inviting feature. When I tried them in a soya sauce sauce they were not as ad as I remembered form when Andrew and Sonia made them for us in New Zealand.
Then we had dessert, this was probably the least Japanese dish as it was doughnuts or green tea sponge cake, I chose the doughnuts and Sonia and Andrew chose the green tea sponge cake. The doughnuts were very nice and very light, which was a good thing after such a large meal.