Onsen Quotes

You’re neat. I mean, your bathroom. It’s so tidy.” Jason straightened, quirking his eyebrow. He held her gaze, his green eyes bright and focused until she looked away. “It’s almost like you have, I don’t know, a woman in your life who takes care of this stuff for you,” she said with a pang of jealousy that was threatening to eat her insides alive. “Even my bathroom is not that clean.” Jason smiled. “I do.” “You do?” “Yeah. Her name’s Belinda.” A sentiment of distrust crept into her thoughts. She was right. There was a woman in his life. She grinned, but she couldn’t breathe. Why was she feeling jealous all of a sudden? How had Jason managed to become such an important piece of her life so fast? It seemed like only a moment ago she stood frustrated in the parking lot when he stopped to ask if she was okay. A moment that turned into a date and then a trip to a faraway place. And now she was fretting over a woman she didn’t even know.

Who’s Veronica then?” Jason paused his movements and inhaled a deep breath. “The girl from the photo?” “Uh-huh.” “Don’t trust everything you read.” “There must be some truth in here.” “Sure. Some. Most of it is crap. It’s publicity.” “She’s pretty.” “She was a mistake. That’s all.” She didn’t look like a mistake to Rhea. Her moist lips pressed against Jason’s cheek, somewhere in the French Riviera, overlooking the endless azure. Ah, no. Definitely not a mistake. Rhea swallowed hard, waiting for a believable explanation. Jason’s gaze shifted to her, and he dropped the knife, reaching for a dishcloth. Wiping his hands, he stepped closer and ran his fingers along her cheek. A strand of hair got caught in her lip balm and he brushed it off her face and tucked it behind her ear. “You have nothing to worry about, Rhea. There are things from my past I’m not proud of. But if it’ll make you feel better, you can ask me anything you want to know.

There is fresh fruit, eggs Benedict in a creamy hollandaise sauce, scrambled eggs with goat cheese, truffle onsen eggs, brioche French toast, steamed rice, miso soup, grilled salted mackerel, rice with a salty pink pickled plum on top----enough to feed an army.

After lunch we went to have our feet nibbled by hundreds of tiny fish. Then, after that- just kidding, I'll explain. The onsen offers a skin treatment where you dip your feet into a shallow pool stocked with Garra rufa, also known as doctor fish, which perform primitive exfoliation by slurping dead skin off your feet with their tiny jaws. This is illegal in most U.S. states, where health authorities believe that sharing fish between customers is as sanitary as sharing unsterilized tattoo needles. I find this reasoning persuasive. Naturally, we all went and joined a random stranger at the fish pool. I'd heard of this fish treatment before, probably from a "hey, you've got to see this" link passed around online, and somehow I had the idea that it involved the occasional wayward fish sidling up to your foot. Try dozens, hundreds, all gnawing simultaneously. You can feel the little bites. At first it provoked a deep-seated piranha fear which I quelled by sitting still, taking deep breaths, and telling myself I had nothing to worry about other than blood-borne diseases. After that, it proved quite relaxing, although I did give up before my allotted fifteen minutes and went back to the painful reflexology pool where you walk around barefoot on jagged rocks. My feet are still baby soft, but when I need my next treatment, I'll post to Craigslist. Need feet nibbled. Will pay.