Monday, May 19, 2008

Gero

If you take the wide view Hida train out of Nagoya for a hour and a half, you end up in the center of the Gifu Prefecture in a city called Gero. And if you are a little tired when you step off the train, you might think, for about a second, you are in Leavenworth.But then you come too, notice there is nothing German going on here, a train behind you that makes it easy to get home and no thought of an Oct. feast.So, Gero is a small mountain town in central Japan, one of three well known cities known for it's 'Onsen' or natural hot springs. Sometimes back in American, this is refereed to as public baths. There is also a couple of temples here too.All over city are these bath house and they cost between 300 and 600 yen to enter. They are all really clean, although the Y300 ones look not so nice form the outside. Of course you can not take photos inside the Onsen, that would be rude. Although, you can take a photo of this one.Kind of like Shin Kani, Gero is build around the banks of a river, in this case the Hida river. And in the middle of the park in the middle of the city just off to the side of a overpass bride is the free public public bath. This was more advance, and I could not conjure up the fearlessness to give this a try, but all day people would walk up, get naked and soak in the pool. And all day, people, families, tour groups would walk over the bride and watch.You can get a better idea from this view, this is early in the morning when the pool was a little low on water. The city center is cool too.They have a 4 or 5 block long waterfall running down the center of main street. And on either side of the waterfall is shops and restaurants full of good food.

2 comments:

Erin said...

Hahaha did you get back okay?

Demian said...

Actually, I almost miss the train I wanted to take, and would have had to wait 35 minutes for the next one... but the train was 2 minutes late. All was good.