Day 14 in Japan – Himeji Castle Festival

Had a nice sleep in this morning until about 10 am, then spent some time actually playing with my iPad. So far I had really only been using it to look at pictures and movies from home, but I finally got around to putting in some time with a few of the games - some pretty cool stuff. I would like to again make sure that Aaron and Fletch know that if they ever need an organ, loan of money or a first born that they can consider it done without asking.

After a bit of a relax in the relative cool (only 30 degrees today

instead of the high 30’s of the rest of the week), Sam and I headed off for Himeji again to enjoy some more of the Himeji Castle Festival. Himeji Castle is huge white castle that has been standing in it’s current form since the 1500s. It’s one of the

most famous castles in Japan, and a World Heritage site. At the moment, however, Himeji-jo is undergoing renovations, so a lot of the castle is covered in scaffolding, and you can’t visit the inside

of the main keep. That didn’t stop the festival going ahead, however, and Sam and I were pretty keen

to experience some festival foods and games.

We met up with what ended up being a fairly large group of JETs at 12:30 at Himeji station. There were a mix of people who I had met at the Tokyo Orientation (Nick, Dan, Wendy, Nate, Christine, Andrew, Fiona) and a bunch of new people including a few new ALTs from Group B (Heidi, Wendy from London) and a few already-established teachers from the local area. First stop on the agenda was food – we went to an okonomiyaki restaurant and tried a bit of everything on the menu – yakisoba, yakiudon, a

few cheesy omelette things and some other deliciousness. It was quite tasty and only set us back about AUD$12 (900 yen).

After lunch we hit the festival stalls and walked around eating shaved ice and drinking expensive beer from paper cups. We ran into people dressed as all kinds of feudal lords, and even got some photos with a funny-looking Himeji mascot. There were huge turtles, a waste-sorting stall (Yay! Come and sort some trash for FUN!), fishcatching stalls and a few food stalls.

After a while of walking around and watching the bride/fashion/feudal lords shooting rifles acts on the stage, we decided it would be nice to actually see the castle, and walked up towards the building. It turned out to be free entry (woo, saved 600 yen) and so we had a nice hour or so walking through the grounds of the castle, and looking at the very geometric holes to shoot people through and the holes to drop boiling oil on people from and pretty trees. We saw the nice view of Himeji from the gardens, and O-kita’s well, the long corridor and the vanity corridor. It was pretty awesome to think about how long some of those structures have stood, and I kept trying to imagine someone else walking up the same stairs I was climbing 600 years ago.

While we were touring the castle, the parade started in town, so we hurried (hurried being a relative term, meaning we stopped for ice cream and souvenirs on the way) down to catch brass bands, kendo clubs, dance troupes and even flipping ninjas and horseback samurai heading down the main street of Himeji. It was a lovely way to spend an afternoon sitting in the sun watching all kinds of interesting spectacles parade by.

We went to a fantastic place for dinner (280 yen for everything including both medium and large beers. Honestly, who would get a medium beer when a large beer is the same price?), and then onto a karaoke place for a few hours. Karaoke was pretty epic and fairly cheap – for 15 of us, it was 6000 yen for 2 hours – that's only about AUD$75. We brought our own beers from the convenience store, which was very convenient. Some epic Scissor Sisters, Journey, R. Kelly and poor ACDC later, it was time to head home, so we hopped on the slowest train in the known universe and had a pretty late night home.

Of course, we had to do the late night convenience store on the way home, so Sam got a midnight chicken burger, and I got a fresh cream swiss roll (I keep seeing them everywhere, and had been hankering after one for a few days) – a slight variation on the late night kebab but still good.

Food highlight of the day: At dinner we tried a few interesting things including fried chicken cartilage (surprisingly good when we followed Nate’s advice - “keep biting when you get to the hard bit”) and deep fried camembert. And just for the record, the two whole deep fried camembert rounds came with knobs of butter on top. Yes. Battered, deep-fried cheese WITH EXTRA BUTTER. I love Japan.