Katsura and Himeji

We started off the day by taking the subway and rail to Katsura Rikyu. It was raining quite hard, and by the time we got to the villa, our jackets, shoes and pants were all soaked through. Along the way I decided that we should start calling our cabin in Alta "Alta Rikyu". Maybe I'll make up signs and offer tours. The grounds and villas were spectacular but the tour was a little too structured, and even had a guard trailing along to sweep up stragglers. The combination of the guard telling us to move on, the interdiction of tripods AGAIN (WHY?) and the heavy rain made it pretty hard to get a decent shot in, but I gave it a few tries. Here are a few picture of the villa:





From Katsura, we took a cab to Kyoto station, where I took my now full (238 photos on a 512 MB card) memory stick to the camera store in the Porta underground mall for offloading to CD. It was a little over priced and took 40 minutes, but now the card is free for the rest of the trip! From here, we hopped on the Shinkansen to Himeji, where it thankfully was not raining, and walked the grounds of the castle.

I took a few pictures




And got a few on digital which I was unable to get on film before the bird flew away!



The castle and it's grounds are impressive and beautiful in a way that defies description, at least by me. You can see photos of it beforehand, read about it in twenty different books or take a virtual 3D tour, but nothing prepares you for it's grandeur. This goes for the outside of course, but most especially when you tour the interior, with it's meter thick supports which reach almost from bottom to top.


Here is a photo of the wooden lattice of the castle.


And a few more views.






It truly is one of the most elegant and impressive man made structures that I have ever seen.

We went to dinner at the same restaurant as yesterday and had mostly the same things, with the addition of a Kyoto green vegetable soup and few other interesting things. In order we have (skimmed tofu, some kind of soup that I forgot the name of -- I think it had fried tofu in it though, cuttlefish, hokke, Kyoto vegetable soup:






Desert was sesame (!) and vanilla ice cream in mochi. Although I enjoy trying strange ice cream flavors, sesame ice cream ... sucks.