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Published: February 13th 2010
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Yesterday I woke up and joined my new friends in the common room again (Kyle and the Swiss guy- Kasper), and also an American guy who has been living in Japan for 18 years, so as you can imagine his Japanese is fantastic. And he also speaks heaps of other languages too, he speaks Japanese, Russian, and Spanish (oh, and English naturally) fluently, and he also speaks German, Chinese, Malaysian I think, enough to get by! Wow! That really impressed me! I would love to be able to speak heaps of languages! But it's only a matter of trying right? There's no reason to stop me from doing just that if that's what I want. But back to yesterday, we all sat around and talked for a good hour again before 10am when it was check-out time and Kyle left for Hiroshima and so I went down to the station to catch a train to Himeji. Himeji is a town that has one of, if not the best, castles in Japan. So it was a must see on my travels! And it was definitely impressive! Actually when I first arrived I went to a place called Shosha mountain, Kyle had gone
the day before and said that if I was going to Himeji that Shosha was also a really good place to see. So I went there first before seeing the castle. It is the place where they shot the movie The Last Samurai, or so I'm told, so that was pretty cool to see that. From Himeji station you catch a bus to the ropeway station that takes you up to the mountain and from there you walk around and see all the different shrines and stuff. It was really pretty, a very nice walk among the trees. It was a hot day and most of the paths were uphill so that was a little tough but good none the less! I spent a few hours there and then caught the bus back to Himeji castle.
The view of the castle that you get from the road and also from just in front of the castle in the park area is a photo that I had seen so many times and so I was really looking forward to seeing it. It was a bit later in the afternoon and so there wasn't that many people there which was good,
there were still quite a few but not as many as I had expected. It really is a sight to behold. A big white castle sitting atop the hill looking over the city of Himeji. I went inside too, of course, and it was 6 floors I think. And every floor had different uses and exhibited different things, and the view from the top was really good too. I would love to live in a castle, and that's not the every girl wants to be a princess dream, I just love the old wooden ceilings and floors and spaciousness, and it's something that not everybody can say isn't it?
It took a while to see all of that too, there were quite a few foreigners there as well, but I did expect that because it is a big tourist spot. It's always funny when you see other foreigners in Japan, you always look and become very curious about them, it may just be because I don't see that many in Hakodate like I've said before, but they look too!
So I left Himeji and caught the train back to Kobe, feeling very tired, probably due to staying up
late the night before and walking around all day. Yesterday I used the last of my special cheap train ticket, that has been such a saviour! I admit that at times the long all stop train journeys have been tedious but I have got to see so much of the countryside and small towns of Japan, and that's what I wanted to do, I didn't always want to be where all the other tourists were. And it also saved me a great deal of money! Even if I had still taken all local slow trains and bought my tickets each day when I used them, I saved over $100, but I know that I would have been tempted to use the express trains and so forth for pure convenience, and those trains are more than double the price, so Thank-you Seishun 18 kippu!!!
I only have a few more train rides between the next couple of cities but they are relatively close together so it won't be that expensive.
After getting off the train I went to the "innocent" internet cafe to write my last entry, and started to head back to the YH at 8.30pm. And because it
was a Friday night there were people everywhere, some dressed to the high heavens, business men, and well all sorts really. I've said it before but the atmosphere in Japan, even at night is so good, I never feel unsafe and I love that! Actually saying that, I have to tell you a funny story, not a first hand account but funny anyhow. Kyle, the Canadian I met, said that his first night in Kobe he was walking around and a few times he had hookers come up to him and literally try to drag him into hotels and other places, they actually grabbed him!! I found that so funny, but maybe because I am a girl and they wouldn't try it on me, hahahaha! It's weird because I always thought that japanese girls were more submissive than other girls, well that wasn't submissive behaviour! Aah, how funny, Kyle wasn't impressed though!
So, today I decided to go to a place called Maiko, which is where the longest suspension bridge in the world is located. The bridge is called the "Akashi Kaikyo bridge" and links Kobe in Honshu to Awaji island which is in between here and Tokushima in
Shikoku. It was built, well finished, in 1998 and is an engineering marvel. I went to the museum that explains how it was built and how it overcame all the drawbacks and stuff, very interesting. The Japanese really do live up to being people who are excellent at engineering and technology. It was amazing to see what they did and how they did it. They had to make the bridge both earthquake and typhoon resistant, and also the tidal currents in the ocean below the bridge are also very strong and so they had to deal with that whilst they were making the foundations. So clever. The bridge is 3, 911m long, and you can go on a promenade underneath the bridge and see the, uh...big metal poles and stuff. Sorry, but I'm not an engineering person, I did understand the concrete slump tests that they showed in the museum, thanks to a boyfriend that explained that to me once! So after the museum I went there, it was cool to see and whenever a big truck drove over the bridge overhead it shook! But the views of the ocean were very cool, 47m below, you could see all the
ships passing underneath.
Next I went to the park that is next to the bridge, so that I could get a good photo of it and met a Spanish guy who actually thought I was Spanish and so started to talk to me in Espanol. I had no idea what he was saying so he then started to talk in English. Why do people think I am anything but Australian??? And Spanish, were did that come from?
So after my engineering lesson I caught the train back to Kobe and I was going to catch the monorail to one of the man-made islands in the port that is supposed to have a nice waterfront area, but the monorail isn't operating today so there goes that idea. So I just walked around the streets and shops for a while before coming back to the internet cafe. I actually really like Kobe, even though it is a big city, it's not crazy big and is located on the water. And the area where my YH is located, in an area called Kitano, is really cool. Little streets and shops and restaurants along the side and pebbled streets, nice. But off to Osaka tomorrow, I'm sure you've all heard of that one! OK, signing off for now. Sending my love!
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