The Onsen Experience

Bit of a TMI?

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“Was it coed?” Sandra asked as we sipped our drinks in a pub called Beersaurus in Tokyo.

“Oh, no.” I replied, taking a pull from my first ever gin and tonic she had convinced me to try, pausing for dramatic effect. “So many penises.”

Not counting the one I live in, I’ve been to fifteen different countries. Mexico is the one I’ve spent the most time in, about six months total. Yeah, about half of that time was in resorts, but a lot of it was in cities and rural areas that tourists rarely visit. The U.S. is a close second, with half of it being business trips and the other half being mostly Hawai’i, with some Disney thrown in. I got some pretty good culture shocks in Mexico the first time I went back in 1994 to study Spanish near Mexico City, but for a Canadian raised on American TV, the U.S. never held many surprises. I’ve spent a month in Guatemala and a month in Ecuador, and life is definitely different there than in Canada. Various western European countries didn’t surprise me much. Further east, the thing about Romania I found startling was that I don’t think I saw anyone who wasn’t white the entire time I was there. Granted, I was only there for five days, and it wasn’t in a major city.

Ten years ago, I spent a few weeks in Japan, and then last summer I was there for a month. It was the most recent trip where I had what I consider the biggest culture shock of my life. Although that phrase is overstating it. Let’s just say it took some getting used to due to lack of experience and fear of embarrassment.

Like I said, I’ve traveled quite a bit, plus read a lot of fantasy and science fiction and also history so that I am pretty good at immersing myself in and imagining different cultures. I just roll with it. I did get a little miffed at my own country when I noticed that Canadian made alcohol IN JAPAN costs about one third less than what I’d pay for that same Canadian booze in Canada. Just how much are they taxing us on that? And yeah, there is a lot of stuff about Japan where you say well that is definitely different, but that’s why people travel, right?

And I want to be clear that this was NOT a negative experience. It was a novel one that I wasn’t quite psychologically prepared for. It wasn’t even a big deal. And yet, I found myself feeling a fish out of water when I went to climb into some hot water.