Zero to Forty

Pictured is the private hot spring bath which adjoined our room in Kokuya, a 400-year-old ryokan in Nagano Prefecture. As the title suggests, the outside air was roughly zero (C) and the water was about 40 degrees. The advantage of the rotenburo (open-air bath) style is that you can stay in for much longer because you can simple sit up or down to regulate your body temperature. And there is something really special about taking such a bath while fresh dry snow is falling, which is what we had last night on Christmas Eve.