My sunday was occupied. To visit a castle.

First off, here is some long awaited photos that I finally uploaded.

Second, I originally planned to update my blog on sunday since I should have had a lot of free time, but my very nice host family said how about we go to the second largest city in the country, osaka, to see the osaka castle.  It's not the biggest or most famous castle in the country, but it is close by and still has interesting history associated with it.  It was built by one of the most famous people in Japan (toyotomi hideyoshi) so part of the museum inside of it is dedicated to him.  It's a tall building on top of some tall foundation made out of large rocks.  And the building is very pretty, with parts covered in gold.  The inside isn't much of a castle at all, it seems to have been ripped apart to make way for a museum inside, so there are probably other castles that are closer to their original state than this one.  But still, there was a lot to see both outside and inside.

The castle was surrounded by a few layers of rivers and small strips of land, connected by bridges.  There's an inner section that surrounds the castle which has various buildings.  Currently souvenir shops, some archer turrets, a temple, guest houses and so on.  There's lots of nature that surrounds the whole castle, lots of trees, bodies of water, animals, fancy looking architecture, small parks, and so on.

I also saw a bunch of locals just hanging out in the parks on the outer edges of the castle grounds.  Some teenagers practicing dance moves, other people walking dogs and such.  It was a pleasant place.  There were also a few white people, which you don't normally see in Japan but then again it is a big city and the castle is a tourist location.

Also, I really stand out more than my asian classmates who are from china or korea.  Since I rarely, but do, get approached by strangers because you know, I'm white in a place where white people aren't so common.  At osaka castle some asian girl came up to me and asked in english if she could take a picture with me.  So we did.  Just a strange thing that happened out of the blue.

It was also my host family's first time at this castle since the area that they live in they only moved to recently.  So, we all had a good time because they got to see something new too.

In any case, have a look at the later pictures in my new album for the castle pictures.  The nice thing to see is the osaka city next to, or from the castle.  Osaka is a very big city that goes way off into the distance, with mountains visible in the far distance too.  Many tall modern buildings that surround this old castle.  Pictures of the city itself with the mountains in the back, and pictures of the castle side by side with skyscrapers were good images I wanted to take.



Oh, also, after seeing the castle we went to a fancy dinner on the top floor of some kind of shopping location.  It was a sort of all you can eat fried food place.  In this restaurant, the chefs were visible just a few feet away behind an open counter, and they would prepare rounds of fried things to eat 2 at a time.  There was various kinds of sauce to dip the stuff in.  You would just tell the waiter when to stop.  The food varied.  There was some fish and some land meat that was served deep fried on a stick, as well as some vegetables.  But then there was also squid and crab.  I didn't like squid.  It tastes fine but the consistency is such that you could only like squid if you wanted to eat pure cow fat.

I ended up not paying for any of this despite my attempts.  Because my host family is very nice.  They also today mentioned the possibility of going back to osaka next weekend to see the large aquarium.  While I wont take pictures inside of a restaurant, I will try to in an aquarium.