yesterday i got invited, by the sendai esperanto club (japanese people i HAVEN'T EVEN MET YET) to come to their seasonal regional get-together in october. now, the guy inviting me is a japanese-language professor at the school right next to mine (the two schools even have an agreement where we can use their student apartments) and he just so happens to know an old math professor from MY esperanto club here in uppsala! apparently they met in poland at an esperanto convention back in the 80's and still keep in touch!

so he said, they're going to stay at a traditional japanese inn (hotspring and traditional meals included) for a weekend. the club can even drive us to the town so we don't have to take/figure out public transportation. he said himself that it'd be a great opportunity to make japanese contacts, who just so happen to live all around the prefecture (so we could theoretically have more places to easily visit, find jobs more easily etc). it'd also be my first ever trip with esperanto people, my first time speaking esperanto all day.

AND it'd only cost around 16,000 yen ($150 USD?) per person for everything, food, transportation etc included; like $140 of that is the price of the room, apparently japan charges per person and not per room for hotels. now, i hope my wife would want to come with because "cool japan!!" but she hates hot baths, hates socializing in groups of people and doesn't know esperanto so well (also doesn't have much interest in knowing it) so she might not be interested at all, in that case it'd be a huge waste of money for her to go. but when i'm alone she gets too worried about me because i see so badly. so i don't know, even though i'd be with nice old japanese people she might be too worried for me to go alone and would then come with.

anyway. here's the hotel. it even has cats!

the food at the hotel

an english page i found later, which seems to have WRONG info...?!

another english page i found later

yesterday i tried reading all the info on their website. basically it's a pretty old inn so you can't go there if you're in a wheelchair (there's nothing like handrails), most of the rooms don't have their own toilets/bathrooms, they don't really have special services (ex. no room-service, no in-room internet it seems, no boxed-lunch service, you can't smoke in any of the rooms) but you can notify them if you have allergies and they'll change your food, and from what i understood you can use the baths (which are indoors) at ANY time aside from cleaning time which is at like 22-23. they give you rental yukata, and toothbrushes and razors and stuff. oh and the toilets that they do have are western-style.

also, there's really no english anywhere and they very clearly don't often deal with foreign tourists. no english on their site, when searching the place name in japanese i don't find any foreigners who went there, etc - except for that one link i have above, where the person says the owner has extremely bad english. their website is almost entirely in really formal japanese and they're using a lot of words i don't know (for example i don't know ANY food-related words!) but i was able to use a pop-up dictionary.

the food is ALL traditional food aside from some vending machines; only a few things looked like they'd have sugar in them (and only some pastries looked like they'd have white flour) so hopefully i'd be able to request no sugar or otherwise be able to just choose some food that's naturally without sugar. the problem is, i can already envision that the group would want to do a "group party meal" like shabu-shabu which is "dip meat and vegetables in soup broth", and the broth would then have sugar in it. so i'd have to ask if the whole group was okay with not having sugar, y'know...? my wife and i have already talked it over, and if we need to we can TRY to get used to having a tiny bit of sugar / white flour just so that we can actually survive eating out and stuff, but it'd probably mean that we'd both be sick for weeks or months before we got used to it and that's not cool...

anyway, the guy already knows we can't make a decision right now so i said i'll talk about it with my wife once we know the date that we're actually coming to japan, to see if she thinks we have enough time to get used to japan before going on the trip. i think that this is one of those "opportunities knocking on our door" kinds of things that i NEED to take no matter how much it costs (though, 16,000 yen per person isn't actually a high cost in my opinion, it's just that we're poor).