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 ^^