As I took a break from touring on Monday and nothing noteworthy happened, I’ll skip this day now and got straight to Tuesday. The weather was finally good again and I had decided, to take the train to the Kojima-peninsula and visit the huge Seto-Ohashi bridge there, which connects Honshu and Shikoku across the japanese inner sea.

I was able to use one of the local lines, so the train ride wasn’t too expensive. From the Kojima station, I only had to go further south, to reach the bridge… or so I imagined. While it was definitely the right direction, the way to go was much more difficult than that. I had to follow really weird paths besides speedways and trough mountains – sometimes even nearly completely covered with plants xD But after some time, I finally reached the top of the mountain at the top of the peninsula and had a really marvellous sight, that I want to share with you. Enjoy

Along came Sunday and 4 really tired people were driving to the island of Miyajima and the city of Hiroshima: Ayano, Nozomi, Shota and I. We got up at 7 a.m., took our rental car and started our tour – so there wasn’t much sleep, especially as Nozomi and I had been watching a movie until 3 in the night ^^

Our first stop was Miyajima, an island which is considered a sacred place in Japan and houses (among many other amazing buildings and locations) the Itsukushima shrine, one of the cultural world heritages. The huge red torii of the shrine is also a really famous sight and often used in guides and books about Japan. Besides sightseeing, we also tried local dishes, like the maple leave-shaped and deep-fried cakes with cream-filling, that are a known specialty at Miyajima. And of course, there were the deer. The guide map read as follows:

Attention:

The deer at Miyajima are wild. They may eat paper and clothes. Please pay attention and keep an eye on your personal belongings – especially tickets and souvenirs as the deer might eat them.

Luckily, no deer tried to eat our things, but we saw some of them eating paper tissues and other stuff from different tourists. They should have read the warning! You also weren’t allowed to touch or feed them at all, but seemingly neither tourists nor deer seemed to care about that.

After that tour, we went to Hiroshima with our car. After we had finally found our parking lot, it was already really dark, so the sightseeing was reduces to a visit of the Atomic Bomb Dome and the peace memorial park. In the darkness of the evening, these monuments had some kind of a warning and dangerous appearance – maybe this is how they should appear anyway to get their point across.

Before driving home, we decided to eat dinner in Hiroshima and what other meal could we have chosen, than the local specialty Okonomiyaki. So we went to Okono-mimura, where you can eat Okonomyaki on three floors and in a lot of different restaurants that are all in this building. The best thing was (apart from the cool taste!), that the meals were produced directly in front of you, not more than 30cm away – a really nice personal touch to the experience. And of course I was asked again where I came from and if I drank beer and played soccer… that’s what everyone knows about Germany anyways ^^

Now that I’m back in Okayama: here’s a selection of photos from that day. I hope I’ve at least one for all te described things. If not, you can complain and I will dig one up for you

So, after a weekend of touring, I’m back with some input for you. Last Saturday, Nozomi and I visited the Bizen cultural area an the city of Kurashiki, which is about 20 minutes train-ride away from Okayama. The Bizen cultural area, is a small district in Kurashiki, where the buildings from the Edo-period are preserved and you can get a feeling for the typical japanese city of that time. Apparently, it also is a big tourist trap, with a lot of shops, street merchants and some pretty high prices on most of the stuff they sell. And as a good tourist, I also bought some of their goods as souvenirs – with only best interest for the japanese economy in mind, of course

Like with the last article, I’ll leave you with a nice gallery of pictures, that I made that day. Those include shots of Kurashiki, the Bizen cultural area and some more great things I’ve seen or done there. I hope you will enjoy them and feel free to ask any questions that come to your mind

I had planned to climb that damned hill, I already wanted to climb last week, today. But some things just don’t want to be done it seems. When I left Okayama station to go to the mountain, I already had an urge to do something else. Namely shopping. Not for cool stuff, but more for souvenirs (which of course are also cool, but they aren’t for me xD) for my family and friends. Half of the trip’s already over and I don’t want to do that on the last day. So I set out into the city and shops there. In my opinion, shopping doesn’t need a big explanation, so I’ll just throw images at you here and let you ask the questions. Might get interesting, huh?

@Mr. Y: You can even see food!

Yesterday, we finally had some pretty good weather again after all those annoying days before. So I set out for the village of Kibitsu, where the Kibitsu shrine was located – one of the national treasures of Japan. There were only like 15 minutes of walking to do from the Kibitsu train station – easy. The shrine could already be seen from the distance, as the golden parts of the roof glistened in the sunlight above the trees. A pretty nice sight

The shrine was located on the side of a small mountain or a big hill – depends on how you want to look at it. To gain entrance, you had to walk up some stairs and pass the big gate.

As showing all my photos of the Kibitsu shrine here would be a little bit much, I’ll show you the main building and the long stairway that leads down to the lower shrine buildings. It’s about 400m long, if the guide is to be believed and designed to fit the natural form of the mountain.

Afterwards I decided to walk around the region while I was there. I figured, that the way to the next train station wasn’t to far, so that became my direction. On that way, I found a big graveyard, a way that lead uphill into a bamboo forest, where another grave was hidden (looked as big as the ones from the daimyo actually – maybe someone important ) and two hotels on the road, that I judged as love hotels. I’ll tell you why, after you’ve seen a picture of one of their signs:

Actually, I just noted it had an internet address – great! I need to read that one later xD My reasons for my suspicion towards a love hotel are the following ones:

• Just look at the logo and slogan
• high fences where you can’t see through
• a location quite a bit away from the next villages – so totally unusual for a regular hotel!
• and they didn’t charge for whole nights, but instead had prices for several hours

All in all, that makes for a fitting picture for me. Shortly before the train station that I wanted to reach, i also found another shrine, called Kibitsuhiko. As my train had just left the station, I had some time to visit that one too. It was a little bit smaller than the Kibitsu shrine, but still far away from beeing tiny. And it had a big old tree, that had to be stabilized to keep up standing.

Anyway, that was more or less my trip for that day. In the evening, we went to a chinese bar, where the party should take place. We found out there, that this was a goodbye-party for Nozomi, who will go back to her hometown Shimonoseki in April. We both were invited as guests and there was an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can imagine what we’ve done Of course we tried not to look too greedy, as these still were her bosses, but we ate quite a lot. And the beer was always refilled before the glass was empty – seems to be usual in Japan. Sadly, the restaurant already closed at 22.00, so we called it a night already at that time (while we speaking about the night – the bar was on the 20th floor and we had a great view over Okayama in the night). No karaoke here ^^