vacation Saturday1: castle

We visited Okayama Castle in the morning.  There was a giraffe in our taxi, so we obviously got a picture.

Travis and Scarlet got there a bit before us (due to Travis practically stealing a taxi and making us look foolish. :D).  But there was a strat cat and a heron so Scarlet was happy.

The castle walls looked amazing for climbing.  Seriously.  That's all I saw when I looked at them.  I think that even I could probably climb them.  However, Isaac and I stayed off the walls and just commented on what looked easy (or hard) about climbing them.

The castle!  Most of the castle was destroyed at some point or another, either by neighboring tribes or in WWII.  They took the opportunity to rebuild the castle with better earthquake protections and turned it into a museum; we were able to go through almost the whole space.

More rocks that looked fun to jump on.  These were the original castle foundations, so once again we held ourselves back.

The first area was very interactive, with guns and swords to try out,

a palanquin to ride in,  

and a horse to ride on.

This was the view from the top floor.

In the basement there was this photo oppertunity, which at first glance looks pretty boring.

But when you use the flash, you suddenly get a really cool scene behind you!  If you look closely at the black area you can see that the picture is there, but we weren't really sure how it worked.

After the castle we went to the gardens behind it.  There are large fields of grass...that we can't walk on.  I understand they're trying to keep it looking nice, but the cultural differences are apparent: in the US you would be encouraged to walk on the grass.

There were a bunch of cute koi.  They all had different colorations which made them pretty interesting to watch.

Rock bridges!  No one fell off.

A steep bridge!

The drinking fountain water stream shot straight up, vertically.  It was easier to drink from than I expected.

There were tons of koi in the large pond, along with several turtles, and you could feed them!  It was a lot more fun to feed them than I was expecting; there were so many of them that the sound of them trying to get the food and vying for position was surprisingly loud.

This day is also getting rather long, so it'll be continued!