Storm the castle!

Before I start with today’s adventure I want to include two more pictures of Miyajima, which Rhonja totally forgot to add (she wrote our last post since I, Marcel, had some difficulty typing with my arm(which is a bit better now))

The first thing we ran into after the deer on Miyajima was one of the biggest wonders of the earth: the world’s largest rice scoup!

After that we also had a great view of “The great Torii” of which the main picture of this blog  is from

Enough about the past, let’s continue with our new story!

Today we started off relaxed. Slept a little bit longer (since Marcel didn’t sleep that much the night before) and had breakfast in the hotel. It wasn’t that special: just some eggs, sausages, bread and coffee.

After that we decided to head towards Himeji. Public transit was a bit confusing, our navigation keeps showing us the least practical route to take, but a kind Japanese lady at the station showed us the best route.

After a short train ride of about 60 minutes we arrived at Himeji :

In the distance we already spotted our next objective, Himeji Castle! After walking for 15 minutes we got a much better view

Himeji Castle was great! It’s one of the few bigger castles which is still (kinda) in its original state. (the one in Hiroshima was a replica, which is understandable since they dropped a huge bomb there)

Inside there was a lot of stuff to see explaining the history of the castle during several era’s and it had some amazing views

After we went down again, we ran into the souvenir shop where we got the medal as proof of our visit (although these photos should be sufficient as well). For some reason their mascot is a white fluffy ball wearing the castle on its head.

Back in Himeji we decided to grab some lunch in the form of waffles. Of course these weren’t your regular kind of waffles, we had the cheese and tuna ones.

And since the weather was really great we had a drink as well

After our refreshments we went to the castle park. Entrance to the park was only ¥40 yen extra (which is around €0.32) and in hindsight it was good deal. Though the entrance was a bit low to our liking.

Luckily it was all worth it. Although it wasn’t that big in size,we saw at least 10 gardeners constantly taking care of leaves, dirt and plants which gave us some great shots.

After strolling around for a bit we decided to head back to the station. At Osaka station we got lost again but finally managed to find our train back to the station near our hotel, where we opened up our app to find a good restaurant nearby. About 150 meters from our hotel was a place which seemed good.

The only thing English there was a partially translated menu, the staff knew about five English words, so it was time to brush up our Japanese a bit! It even kinda worked out. We received all the different plates we ordered, but when Rhonja asked for cold sake and received room-temperature -sake, we tried to explain we wanted cold sake but in the end we ended up with 2 bottles of sake while the waiter quickly ran away.

The food was great though. They had lots of small dishes to order which all cost the same (¥330). Since meat and vegetables were all the same price we mainly sticked to beef, salmon and chicken with some shitake mushrooms on the side. Apparently they had almost everything on a stick, including spam!

(not sure if it’s readable since we do a lot of compression for uploading, but the dish on the left page, top right corner is spam on a stick)

After our delicious meal we ran into the nearby Family Mart (which is a small supermarket with a really catchy tune which plays when entering the store) to get our breakfast for tomorrow morning.

That is all for today!

PS. Some photos might seem slightly curved, this is because all photos are taken in RAW format. My tablet needs to convert them to Jpg for uploading but it doesn’t take into account the barrel correction, which better software does.