The Onsen we stayed at was called something like the "Swallow Onsen," creative, eh? And this bizarre picture is actually an animatronic set up that plays a bizarre show.
The picture here is the people at the BOE enjoying lots of beer and fairly crappy food. Okay, we showed up late, and by the time we got there the food was pretty much stone cold.
Here is one of my superiors at the BOE, Mr. Sanoma, breaking out with some Karaoke. He would later do some very impressive frog sounds later at the winery.
And here is Matt (another AET) and Mr. Sanoma singing "My Way" at the enkai. I purposely left in the red-eye effect to make him look evil. Heh, heh.
Since we came in at night, I didn't notice this cool little shrine until the morning. There was one of those cut-outs you can stick your head through, but I passed on that.
If you look very closely in this picture you can see Asama-san (Mt. Asama) in the upper left. It's an active volcano and I have some other pictures of it below.
This is Asama-san, or Mt. Asama, they aren't the best pictures in the world, but they were taken from a moving bus, so cut me some slack.
This is Asama-san from a different angle.
We also went to a winery near the Onsen called Mann's Winery. It had crappy wine but this garden was really cool.
The only other good thing about the winery was this giant wine barrel shaped like a turnip. It's probably around 10ft. tall.