On Day 8, we took side trips from Kyoto to Himeji and Kobe. Himeji has a castle (Himeji Castle) that is the largest surviving castle constructed with traditional methods. All other wood castles were destroyed in wars or natural disasters. The castle is made of wood and therefore, no smoking is allowed. (This was NOT taken from Wikipedia but straight from Dave's mouth)The pictures don't show the scale of the castle. We had to take our shoes off inside and our feet hurt after walking through.
Preview of Day 9: Day 9 involves monkeys!
One of my favorite pictures, mainly because of the wood color.
If enemies tried to scale the walls, defenders could drop stones or boiling water, or throw spears or shoot guns through the holes.
Throughout the castle there were different family crests on the tiles to show when that section of the castle was built or remodeled.
A view of the city of Himeji, from the top of the castle.
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For lunch, we ate at a noodle shop where they hand make noodles, as shown by Rob.
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We then went to a garden near the Himeji Castle and saw probably 10 flowers total. Not really the blooming season apparently...
This was really gross to look at for some reason. It really disturbed me and I took a picture and couldn't look at it again.
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We then took the bullet train to Kobe, the birth place of my grandma (FYI - she's not Japanese). The station was near a lively part of town and just walked around town for a few hours.
Gotta take a picture next to the St. Paul sign.
Walked to Chinatown in Kobe.
In Chinatown, we saw a bunch of locals standing in line so of course, we had to try it. We got deep fried beef on a stick and a potato mixture on a stick - it was really, really tasty!
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For dinner, we ate at a sushi bar. It was a conveyor type restaurant, so you grab the sushi plate you want. When you're finished, the server counts the number of plates to total the bill. We actually went to two sushi bars that night.***
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