Kusatsu - Coffee, Toast, Footbaths and Ice Cream.

After our amazing breakfast, clearly we needed to consume more, so we went for butter toast (Buhtah Toast-u!) and really, really good coffee.  It turns out that in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the Japanese got it in their heads to heavily westernize, one of the things they picked up along the way and then went crazy over was great coffee.  So just off the main square in Kusatsu (which is beautiful) is a tiny coffee shop called Caravan Coffee where we went each morning, which was run by a single coffee junky who roasted his own beans, as far as I could tell, and used the vacuum pot method to make me an "Almond Au Lait" that morning that was to die for.

It was delightful, a small place with about five tables, full of old wall clocks (all perfectly synchronized of course)--including some really lovely art deco ones.


Afterwards we walked up the hill to the public park, baths and footbaths area.  It was a really delightful little developed area with lots of nice walkways and lovely little sitting areas were you could soak you feet in the Onsen.

It was also riddled with stacked stones, since people are charmingly the same the world over, in some ways.

And I learned of a lovely tradition I didn't know about: statues are given scarves and hats here, in the winter.

Also, in keeping with the Japanese "you want information, here's ALL THE INFORMATION" mentality: there park had a little thermometer with a delayed ink system of some sort?  The result was an analog thermometer that still tells you the most recent high and low temperature.  Pretty neat.

Afterwards, for lunch (since we knew dinner would be amazing and we didn't want to eat a full meal. . . we got ice cream.  We found a shop that sold ice cream and sprinkled it with toasted sesame see shards, which was delicious.

One of my traveling companions pointed out he had never seen scooped ice cream in the country--it was always served soft-serve style, and this place was an interesting example of that.  The ice cream wasn't from a soft-serve machine, it was scooped, but to serve it to customers, they put it into a counter-top press, which they would then use to turn the ice cream into soft-serve style at the moment of sale.   Truly the most extra of ways to sell ice cream.

We speculated that you can buy pints or half gallons of ice cream in the store here, but that perhaps you are expected to go home and use your own home-use countertop ice cream press to make it soft-serve, and the Japanese equivalent of eating the cookie dough straight from the tube is eating ice cream without making it soft-serve first.

Having dawdled enough around town that our hotel would welcome us back, we returned and took a brief nap before dinner.