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 ^^

As I’ve already written in the last article, I went to meet two of Nozomi’s friends yesterday evening, Ayano and Shota. Nozomi and I met them at a bar (to which we had walked the whole way in the freaking cold) in the center of Okayama. Both of them were a little bit late, but as we could wait in the warm bar inside, this was no big problem.

When we were complete, we started eating and drinking which continued through the whole evening – I really felt stuffed afterwards xD I even ate octopus, but I didn’t really like it. Except for fish, seafood is still not really to my liking. But we had a lot of different stuff to eat too, so that wasn’t a problem: soy beans, rice, udon noodles, soup and much more… of which I didn’t take photos. But I’ll give you a photo of the four of us

Today I’ll be visiting the Kibitsu shrine, one of the national treasures of Japan. And after that, I’m invited to an office party from Ayano’s boss… that’s going to be interesting xD

As I didn’t do anything noteworthy yesterday, due to heavy rainfalls, I’ll just skip that day entirely in my descriptions. Instead I’ll tell you about te stuff that I’ve done so far today – this’ll be more interesting

Today I went to the Kirin Beer Park Okayama – one of the Kirin beer breweries in Japan. I had to drive a bit out of the town to get there, but it wasn’t too far. Mantomi station was like 30 minutes away from Omoto, so that’s ok in my book. When I arrived there, it was raining again, but not too heavily. It actually grew heavier on my way to the brewery (and I was going in the wrong direction first xD) – luckily I had taken one of Nozomi’s umbrellas with me.

When I reached the brewery, I was not only the only international visitor (I had expected that), but also the only visitor at all at that time. So I got a private tour through the brewery from Kanako, who was my guide. We talked about te brewery, Kirin beer, Germany, beer in general, drove with the Kirin bus and had a good time. I even got two beer at the end of the tour, but that’s the regular service. Didn’t taste too bad in my opinion. Maybe a little bit too thin, but not that I’d mind much. So, as I have to prepare to go out with Nozomi and two of her friends later, I’ll leave you with a few visual impressions of the trip

Cya next time!

Yesterday it was rainy and cold again, so I was in a bad mood to begin with. I walked through some shopping malls, because you can’t go to many different places under these weather circumstances, but I didn’t felt really well there. Too much noise from announcements, music and the people working there. Nope, not my thing :/

But I bought a chocolate beer! It could be found under the section for White Day presents (A japanese day, that is connected to the Valentine’s day.  Boys give presents to girls, from whom they got presents on Valentine’s day – great idea of the economy xD). An old women warned me not to buy this for my girlfriend, but as I told her I planned to buy this for myself, she was pleased and walked away again. Or maybe she jynx’d me xD

Here it is at last:

Of course I expected this stuff to taste bad from the beginning. Mixing beer and chocolate just doesn’t work, as awesome as these both thing are when they are separated from each other. Awesomeness doesn’t neccessarily add up. After some testing, I knew I had been right with my expectation… it really tasted awful. I can imagine the old women warning every guy there, because this chocolate beer might really destroy relationships xD I’m longing for a real beer… guess I’ll drink some on Wednesday, when we’ll be out with Nozomi’s friends.

And nope, no gaming hall yet