Back in time again! We took the train out to the countryside and walked around a little village for the afternoon.

This place is fun. Sean dropped his sunglasses down the embankment, so I went down to get them. I put my stuff down on the path, climbed down and climbed up again. …then forgot my phone on the path. Realized this 15 minutes later and had to run back to get it. Problem solved, have phone, but damnit I hate when that happens.

At the train station before we got here, Sean bought cake and shared it.

This is a fairly common example of a house in the area. Not a lot of people, but man were their houses gorgeous! (to be fair, I took photos of the most beautiful houses, although most had a similar style, not all were this lovely)

Mini temple in the middle of some farm land.

I loved this house because most of it looks like this Japanese stereotype, but the balcony is filled with items that could be on a balcony in Vancouver. 🙂

We had decided to go to another train station (free train is awesome!!) and visit the oldest shrine in Japan, but got distracted by this shrine. We saw a gateway, which led up the hill and to the highway here.

At the top of those stairs, shrine! We took photos and cleansed ourselves again, and gave money to appease the spirits and hope all went well.

Hungry, we found a corner store and bought the most delicious apples.

We got on the train again and got off in the town with the oldest shrine. We were hungry, so we found a restaurant that looked good and sat down. Little did we know at the time that we’d be spending many hours there. I posted about those giant bottles of beer before, then were 650 yen, which is an excellent price. We bought 7 of them before we left, and a ton of fish. The most delicious fish I’ve had on the trip so far. We didn’t make it to the shrine!

That night we trained home, dropped off our stuff and headed out to go drinking. We wandered to a place called Space Station that sounded like it might be up our alley, but it was full and the other two didn’t so much like it. (It was playing my kind of music…)

We had pizzas and another drink at a Spanish themed bar/restaurant then continued on.

Almost our last hope before calling it quits and giving up was the Rock Rock Music bar. We went up 3 floors to a little bar, with only 2 other people in it. And it wasn’t a small place. We ordered a drink, because we were there. Before that drink ended, another 8 people showed up as a group and they really livened the place up. They were playing darts and dancing, and the DJ put on some 90s pop punk and we ended up staying there and drinking a lot before 2am when the place closed!

Back home, Sean and I had a game of Star Realms since we didn’t want to lie down for fear of the spins. I had an excellent drunken text conversation with Miranda, since 3am local is 11am PST and I think it was a weekend. She had drunkenly text me the “night” (Vancouver time) before, but I think I may have been a little more over the top. I don’t drink to excess often, but this was a wicked fun night. 🙂

We had to wake up the next morning for 9am so we could pack and be out the door by 10am, as this was our last night in Osaka and we had to check out of our residence. Rough morning! We had nothing but training to Arima Onsen planned for the next day…which is another post!

I realize I’m jumping ahead, but I’m sitting on a train and have some phone photos.

Breakfast of curry tonkatsu! Breaded pork with udon noodles and curry, it was so good!

It is so raining today. We’re soaked. Thankfully, the train is warm enough and covered.

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Every toilet I’ve seen has a control panel nearby for a variety of functions. One button washes your bum…

Also, the faucet on the back of the tank to rinse your hands while the tank fills.

No soap though. Often no soap in public restrooms either. 🙁

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We left Himeji late afternoon, but had a surprisingly large amount of things still to happen. Everything at this point, was completely unplanned, which made it even more exciting that it worked out so well.

First we found food. While in the castle we’d seen a carnival in some park grounds nearby, so we headed there for some street food. We bought skewered pork and chicken, an okonomiyaki-on-a-stick (mine also had an egg – a clean-up disaster waiting to happen. Except that I’d been carrying a wet nap from the airplane all week!) and some deep fried and battered chicken skin. The only photo I got was this, because after this my hands were to dirty to touch the camera!

This next photo is one I forgot in the last post. This is the view of Himeji castle from the Himeji train station. Pretty badass looking!

We decided to head on the train to Hiroshima. We’d never discussed going there, but we were only an hour away by train and our JR rail passes gave us free transport that way, so why not!

We got to Hiroshima…and cabbed to Costco. Sean apparently has a thing for visiting Costcos in foreign countries, so we followed up our carnival dinner with a Costco hot dog. 🙂

Then we cabbed to Peace Park. This is a beautiful park, lost of grass and neat concrete structures. But it’s darkat this point, so it’s a little eerie too. Not to mention that you can see this guy, looming on the horizon as you slowly walk closer to it.

It’s a beast of a building. The entire city has been rebuilt and built up and is nice and modern, and then there’s still ugly, wrecked thing in the middle of it, and then you think about how it came to be wrecked, really think about it hard, and the horror of it all dawns in your mind. It’s a beautiful building, and I hope they never decide to take it down.

We got lost through the city for a bit afterwards, but ended up at Hiroshima Castle park. I saw some guys walk out of this gatehouse…so we walked into it.

And we kept walking through the park.

Now in Vancouver, or North America, when a tourist attraction is shut down, there are gates and signs and stuff. Not here, it’s a straight shot all the way through the park.

Until you finally get to the castle, which was closed. Naturally. It’s 10pm and we’re in the middle of a closed Japanese park. It was pretty fun getting here, and then leaving to catch our train home. When we got to the station we had 20 minutes until the last train to Osaka left, but it was a little fearful for a bit that we might not make it.

Then the hard decision of whether to sleep on the train home or not. 😛 I decided not to, and read my book the whole way home.

A pretty great day. 🙂

This place was on my definite list of places I wanted to go see, and we picked a good day for it. It got hot, but we managed to get inside for a chunk of the day.

It only recently finished being renovated in March 2015, and it was a 6 year renovation!

It was a pretty long line to get inside, so we took the opportunity to take a lot of photos of the outside.

Green tea KitKat. It’s a thing.

Tons of people had brought tarps and it looked like picnics and were hanging out. Because if you had a giant castle in your town, wouldn’t you go hang out near it on weekends?

The line ups continued inside, but there was more room to wander around in places.

Castle selfie!!

Here’s a super fast train that travels from Tokyo to Osaka!

I ran the length of it to get a photo of what I thought was the front. Ended up being the back….

Nik bought 3 different kinds of convenience store sake for the journey. They were differing levels of not my favorite.

The train stations are awesome. There are about 12 platforms at this station, with tons of people going in a variety of directions.

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It’s always a surprise when the drink comes out of the vending machine and it’s hot.

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First two photos are of it cooking. The rest is just before we ate.

And the line up as we left. Thankful we showed up 20 minutes early!

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Waiting for this okonomiyaki restaurant to open, here’s a photo of a small part of the open air mall in this area. It’s early on a Monday, so very few people around.

Nik is reading this blog while in line. 🙂

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