A Happy Beppu Birthday

I celebrated the turning of 24 by yet another Kyushu road trip. With the lovely Lily, witty Anna and gregarious Gabe.

We rented a car early morning on the Saturday and decided to go the scenic route to Beppu. Although avoiding the toll roads was friendly on the pocket, it did take us 9 hours to get there.

However, a car game, like pictionary but with words, amused us for 6 hours. In any case, it's always a pleasure to drive through beautiful Kyushu.

Once in Beppu, by then already 5pm, we met Megan Prosser. For anyone who remembers her from school:

She's the one in the middle

It's a coincidence to both be on JET at the same time. We met in Fukuoka for the sumo wrestling in November. Megan is one of 3 ALTs in the country working for a private school. She gets to teach her own classes and runs a drama club.

Beppu is long famous as a pleasure resort. It has the largest number of hot spring sources in Japan. After much troubled navigation we arrived at one of them. The clay onsen was fabulous.

Immerse yourself in the water and at the bottom is lovely sludgy warm clay which you rub onto your skin for its healing properties.

We met up with some of Megan's friends in an izakaya (traditional japanese restaurant/bar) for dinner. We then headed into Oita (a much larger city 20 minutes away where Megan lives) to a gaijin club. It was a small foreigner club. But there was real music. And real dancing. An open bar with a nominal fee mixed with the heat and humidity... you can only imagine...

The next day after finally rising above the hangover we went to an onsen with a steaming waterfall and waterfall massage * Bliss * before choosing the toll roads over scenic faffing.

My birthday finished up with a delicious italian-pizza-oven-pizza at a fancy restaurant above a bakery that I've been wanting to try for a long time, but never did, secretly thinking I would save it for my birthday and then forgot about it, until I remembered on the journey home.