Hi friends!
Rest assured that I have not forgotten about you, my dear and few readers. As I get used to life in Japan, my free time becomes lesser and lesser, leaving me with no time to blog. In the past few weeks, a couple of my classes ended, so I had to finish up studying for finals as well as writing my final papers and presentations for those classes. But anyway, now I'm finally on winter break and have a bit of time to catch up on blogging.
First, I wanna talk about my experience a few weeks ago of visiting Himeji Castle. Himeji is a place west of Kobe, and by train, it took about an hour to get there. Not too bad. To be honest, I'm a little bit of a nerd for ancient history, and I've always wanted to visit a castle. Although Himeji Castle was rebuilt after being damaged, I was still super excited to go visit. I went with two of my friends from class and another exchange student friend.
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| Outside the castle walls |
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| Himeji-Jo |
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| The castle! |
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| Today's squad |
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| Picture from the courtyard |
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| Another picture by the castle |
Even though it's not the original, everything still had an ancient history type of feel to it. It reminded me of all those Asian-themed ancient war games I used to play (although this is a stupid thing to think about). It was still super cool. We took tons of pictures as we were outside walking into the castle on the rocky paths among the walls, and even more pictures when we got inside - the whole inside was wooden and clean.
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| Picture with a soldier outside the gates |
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| Walking into the castle |
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| Apparently this is the only original wall left from the original castle |
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| View from the inside |
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| The castle courtyard |
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| Side view of the wall |
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| Miniature plan of the castle and its surroundings |
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| Trapped inside the castle D: |
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| Some pieces of writing left from the original castle |
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| Weapon racks on the walls |
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| Tiny people |
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| View of the city |
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| The castle again, closer view |
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| Stone walls |
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| Ain't she majestic |
The castle was really compact but had a ton of staircases, and all the staircases were really, really steep. I was a little bit scared for all the elderly people touring the castle...even I felt like I was about to fall off at any second. If this was exactly how the original castle used to be, I can't imagine how the soldiers would run up and down those stairs.
After the tour of the castle, we went to a giant Japanese-style garden in the castle courtyard. The garden had a bunch of different areas - for various plants, flowers, bamboos, seasons, and themes.
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| Autumn is coming! |
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| Waterfall |
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| Pond |
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| Little white flowers |
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| Bridge over troubled water |
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| Aww |
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| Resting in a little section inside of the garden |
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| Himeji Castle's mascot is the cutest thing ever |
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| Blue and I as an ancient married couple |
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| Group photo with some warriors |
Going through the garden may have taken just as much time as going through the castle, because it was that big. However, it gave us some much-needed relaxing time.
Afterwards, we visited a donut shop, and I bought what may have been the most delicious donut I've ever eaten.
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| Yay! |
Switching gears, I wanna post some photos of a circus I went to on another day. Going to see a circus in Japan was definitely not something I expected to be doing here. But, coming here, I had a mindset of "Yea, I'll just do whatever sounds cool." So a circus it was. One of my friends, another exchange student here, Shelby, wanted to go to the circus that was visiting Kobe for her birthday, so a group of us headed to Kobe, by the airport, for the performance.
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| The monorail to the airport allowed us to see some beautiful ocean scenery |
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| It's a circus! |
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| Circus balancing guy |
I've never been to an actual circus before, and this was definitely an actual circus. It was a traditional, traveling circus. With a temporary tent, chairs placed on dirt ground, and all the traditional circus performers - a fire breather, a balancing guy, acrobats, clowns, and jugglers. I can definitely say that I've gotten the real circus experience now. Happily for me, they didn't use any circus animals such as elephants and lions, because those animals always look so sad in their cages. So I enjoyed the performance.
Afterwards, we went to Kobe Harborland to enjoy some scenery and eat dinner. The place went to eat dinner at was a super couple-y place, so it was a bit awkward. However, we still enjoyed some good, although a bit pricey, food with good atmosphere.
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| I can never get tired of Harborland scenery |
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