We started out from Hokkudai on Friday morning and had a lovely drive through southern Hokkaido on a beautiful sunny day. I was tired from sleeping poorly at my noisy dorm the past week, so I dozed on and off during the 6 hour drive (I don't have my international drivers licence yet so the students have to drive for me). I asked very specifically whether this place was the same as the last place that we stayed where towels were provided etc., and was told yes, it was the same and should bring all of the same things as last time.
We unloaded the car once we arrived and one of the students showed me to my room. Walking down the hall, he paused by the first door, pointed and said “this boys room”. We continued down the hall to the last room where he pointed at the door and said “this girls room”. I went into the room and it was traditional Japanese style with one large tatami mat room with futon for the floor to sleep on (no bed – and there was a bed in the last place so that should have been my first clue). There was a small traditional style toilet in the room and a separate bath. Both the toilet and the bath looked really old, but so did everything else in this place so I didn't think much of it. After the long drive, I really needed to take a leak so I used the toilet. Turns out that I should have checked to see if the plumbing was connected first...... So today I have to tackle cleaning the toilet in my room – at least is was a #1.
We didn't have very much time before low tide so I went back to the lab to help prepare the gear and dinner before we went out. I guessed that since the toilet in my room didn't work, neither did the bath and in anticipation of being very cold after a night in the wind and salt spray I wanted to know where the usable bath was (and I was actually a bit scared of the look of the bath in my room). I asked and the students looked a little uncomfortable but sucked it up and took me to the shower room which is off the kitchen (seemingly an add on because the baths in the rooms were no longer functional). There are three shower stalls off a small main carpeted room, each with a sliding door. The students said that this is the shower room and that the magnetic chart on the hot water tank outside the door is used to indicate whether the person in the shower is male or female and whether any others are allowed into the main room while that person is in there. Of course this whole chart (here's a photo) is in Kanji and they were giggling away (so was I) as they explained this to me, knowing fully that I would walk back to this thing in 5 minutes and have no idea where to move a magnet. They also told me that no one really uses this system anyway.
Ok, whatever. I can deal with that because at least each shower stall has its own door and privacy. I was certain that the students would be more concerned than I anyway. So the next thing I asked was where to find the towels (there were towels provided to us at the last dorm). They all looked confused and panicked and told me that there were no towels provided by these places. So it turns out that at the last place, towels were provided to the women but not the men – hence my confusion when I asked if this place would be the same as the last and they answered yes. Good thing that the student who was left behind to write his thesis leaves a towel stashed here for himself.
All of that behind us, it was time to gear up and head out for work. It was a cold night. I measured a rock surface temperature of 1.5 degrees at the wind exposed site. Work went fine and this site was much easier to walk around at than the sites at Akkeshi. We finished work and returned to unload and clean gear and eat some dinner around 23:00. Tonight we had Nabe and I helped one of the students cook it (it is really easy to cook). We had cod heads in our soup (here are a couple photos)
and as luck would have it, I ended up with the remnants of the eyeballs in my bowl of soup. Really that seems to be par for the course given the way that the rest of the day had gone. In the end I didn't eat the eyeballs, or much of the rest of the head. We all had a good laugh at my reluctance to eat such things.
I slept well last night and was thankful to not have a construction crew drilling holes in the concrete next to my head in the morning. This morning, I write this blog while looking out at an angry Pacific and monster waves crashing over the rocks outside the dining room window. That will surely make tonight interesting.
