Day 20: 88 Temples (none) - Tosashimizu

Rest day.  My body wants it.  I planned a very lazy day of laundry, lunch, TV, dinner and bed.

It rained hard during the night.

Breakfast came at 7 to my room and fish is like bacon with little bones.  It rained hard for a bit but was a better day than I expected given the weather report. Still, it was a good choice for a rest day.

The maid came to clean and we had one of those exchanges where nobody really knows what going on but I think I conveyed I was going out to do laundry in a minute.  The room was spotless when I got back.

While I cleaned my clothes at the nearby coin laundry, I walked around town during the wash and dry cycles.  Clearly in years past this may have been quite a party town.  The evidence lingers but it is very quiet now.  There are a lot of restaurants and bars but they certainly weren't  busy on Saturday night.  Today at 10am I saw a gaggle of old girls going into one of the still operating coffee places.  They probably have been meeting there for 40 years.

There seem to be only old people around and all of the shop proprietors are very old.  I feel quite young here!  The "commercial" street has only a dozen businesses on it.  It is a painted street and strange elevator music plays from street speakers.

I think back to my trips to Japan over the decades and can imagine what this place would have been like in the 70s and 80s, maybe into the 90s.  The women would have been shopping during the day and fishermen would have been drinking at the end of the day.  Restaurants and nightlife would have been quite lively.

After laundry I sat around until lunch.  I went to a teppanaki place.  There was a big cooking surface with stools around it.  I think there was only one thing on the menu but is came in small, medium and large.  The variation came in which sause you chose.  Two other people came in and our chef made our pancakes which we ate from the cooking surface with a spatula and a fork.

After lunch I wandered up to the supermarket and bought a few things for my afternoon of TV watching.  The most expensive thing were the grapes which looked so enticing inthe display but we're pretty bad.  I watched 4 episodes of Nancy Drew I had downloaded to my phone.

When the 6pm music started playing on the city speakers I thought I should get some dinner.  I found this little place run by a couple.  There was a table of younger people and me at the bar.  We had some lively Google Translate conversations.  The food was good and I had 3 beers.  It was quite fun.