Hikone Castle
We headed off from Tennoji for Hikone on the morning of the 27th. Beforehand though we had breakfast at a pretty awesome coffee joint. Had ham toasted sandwiches and hot coffee—delish. Then it was off to the station. We zoomed over to Kyoto station, and while we were they’re I saw this one train called the “Twilight Express”. Inside I saw tables with candles and wine bottles, as well as some sleeper cars. It had come all the way from Sapporo, Hokkaido.
While waiting for the right train, we turned to the college guy behind us if the next one went to Hikone/Maibara. He told us yes it did—in English. He asked where we were off to and we said Hikone, and that we were backpacking around Japan. As we told him our route, he stopped us as we told him we were staying near Fuji. He said he was on his way back home to Fujinomiya: the town where our hostel would be, three days from then. Turns out this guy was a student from Kansai Gaidai, and had studied abroad in Australia when he was fifteen. What was even crazier was that he lived in the same city as Jace and Paul are going to school right now. It’s a small small world. He gave us his phone number, and we’re gonna try to meet up when we get to Fujinomiya.
Anyways, at last we hopped on our train and made it to Hikone. Turns out it’s not at all a big city, which was a nice change of pace. We trudged our way to where the entrance was for the castle where we found some lockers where we could put our stuff—keep in mind that we were carrying ALL our belongings for the trip, and they were getting quite heavy by then.
Up the castle grounds we went with a much lighter load (yay), everything was quite beautiful and old. Not too different from other castles I’ve seen, but beautiful none the less. The castle itself looked older on the outside though. The ones I’ve seen thus far (Osaka and Nagoya), had been very pretty to look at from the outside, because they’d been referbished, etc. They look like they’re in their prime. However the insides of these referbished castles have mostly been redone so that they look like museums, leaving very little of the original internal structure intact. This was not the case with Hikone.
After the castle we headed out to eat a budget lunch of peanut butter sandwiches outside a corner store. It was good. It was getting late at the time and we still had another city to get to that day. So the three of us trudged back to the station to catch the train to our next destination: Nagoya.
Next post will come tomorrow! Sorry for the wait. Traveling is very distracting. Hope you all had (have?) a fantastic New Years Eve and Day!
Happy rice making.
