Yakitori and Himeji.

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First of all, congratulations to Amit for having bathed with Japanese Yakuza and telling them that their tattoo is "delicious." I feel like I've missed out on an authentic japanese experience.
Ok, so the town of Kurashiki is known for a beautiful stretch of canal, lined with warehouses that eventually turned into museums. Of course, by the time we got to the city, all the museums were closed. The total length of the canal of interest was maybe 200 meters. And in fact, the entire city could be traversed in a matter of 30 minutes. Given that, it was actually a really good night. The canal was infact very picturesque, and in our search for a restaurant (the entire city pretty much shut down after 7PM), we were able to find an authentic soba restaurant bwhere they hand made their own soba. Susan was quite impressed by the texture and flavour, and I must say, it was much much better than the soba we had at the 1000 year old noodle house in Koto (though still not quite as good as the noodles at Nagano).
After the noodles, we walked along the Chuo Dori of the city and happened upon a yakitori place, and sampled some tasty skewers (all ordered from pictures without a good understanding of what they are). During our stroll we also walked through the Ivy square, which is a nice garden with a European flavour, apparently a popular place for weddings in this area.
The next morning we had planned to stop by the museums prior to catching our train, but I overslept, and so instead we rushed towards the train station and barely caught our train to Himeji.
Himeji-jo is considered Japan's most beautiful castle. It was okay. A big castle in a small city. Though I can imagine that the castle would be beautiful in Sakura season. We did sample some really tasty hand made udon in the city though. The place is called Me-N-Me, and is located on Chuo Dori close to the castle. The chef was making the udon straight from dough right there in front of us, and indeed it was the best udon I've ever tasted, with that slight sweetness of fresh dough still in the udon. Because of that delicious bowel of noodles we missed our train to Kyoto, and had to catch a latter train, but it was totally worth it.
I also had rose-flavoured ice cream, which tasted like how roses smells like, really quite good.

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