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The flight was a little bumpy, but fine. It seemed we made some time, because we arrived at Haneda Airport in Tokyo a bit earlier than scheduled, close to 05:00 local time. The sun was already up and the weather was warm and humid – a big change from Sydney’s current cold and dry weather. We caught a Keikyo line train to Shinagawa and there bought Shinkansen tickets for the bullet train to Okayama. We briefly went outside the northern side of the station to see if there was any place we could buy something for breakfast, but nothing was open, presumably because it was ridiculously early on a Sunday. But looking in past the Shinkansen gates we saw a small prepared food shop and so we went through the gates and grabbed a pre-packed bento box for me and some kelp onigiri for M. so that we could have a breakfast on the train.
We boarded the Shinkansen departing Shinagawa at 06:22. We had non-reserved seating tickets, which meant we had to get on the first three carriages only, which we only realised as the train was pulling in, so we had to dash up the platform to get the right carriage. Many of the seats were taken, and we were lucky to find two adjacent seats in car 2, in a row of three on the left side next to a young Japanese guy who was sleeping most of the time. The train hurtled us along the tracks past some good views of Mt Fuji. At Nagoya several people got out and we switched to the right side of the carriage where a set of two seats by themselves had become vacant. We continued through Kyoto, Osaka, until we finally arrived at Okayama just before 09:30.
We checked into our hotel, which was just near the station, but they wouldn’t give us a room until 15:00. So we left our luggage there and went off to explore Okayama. The main sites here are the Okayama Castle and Korakuen Garden, which sit facing one another on opposite banks of the Asahi River, a walk of a few blocks from our hotel. We visited the castle first.
Built originally in 1597, the castle was destroyed in World War II, and reconstructed afterwards from 1964-66. We walked around it, admiring the impressive building from the outside. Around the back, we went inside, and that's when you can really tell that it's a modern building, with essentially none of the original old castle remaining. It’s interesting with several museum displays of samurai-era artefacts, but it's a little disappointing that it’s such a modern building, not something centuries old.
We'd bought combo tickets to the castle which included entry to the Korakuen Garden, across a pedestrian bridge over the river. This is one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan, and definitely worthy of that title it is. It’s quite large, built around a massive central pond and lawn area, with multiple specialised gardens around the edges: a maple grove, giant bamboo forest, cherry blossom garden, flowering plum garden, iris patch, rice paddies, wisteria walk, cycad garden, and so on, interspersed with multiple traditional tea houses, resting shelters, Buddhist temples, stone lanterns, and many other features. You could easily spend half a day in here seeing it all.
We didn’t spend quite that long, maybe three hours or so, and we skipped a few sections. M. stopped at a tea house inside the garden and got an iced matcha drink. This place insisted that everyone who entered order something, and they only had tea drinks, so I couldn't get anything. Which meant I had to stay outside. I sat on a seat nearby, thinking M. could get her drink and come out to join me, but they served it in a glass and she had to stay inside the tea house while she drank it. But I figured this out and returned to tell her over the fence not to rush and just take her time drinking it. Meanwhile I topped up my sunscreen.
We continued exploring after this and left the garden just before 13:30 because we wanted to get some lunch. We found a tiny udon restaurant right outside the south gate of the garden, apparently operated by two little old women who knew about six words of English between them. The place only had Japanese signage, but Google Maps tells me it’s called Shiromi-Chaya. M. had the “Wild Plants Udon”, which was udon noodles with “special wild plants”. I had the “Local & Seasonal Tempura Udon”, which was a bowl of noodles and a side plate of tempura prawns, squid, and various vegetables, including a strange leafy green thing a bit like a fern leaf that I couldn’t identify. (Later: it was a shiso leaf.)
The meal was really good, especially for sitting in such a cool old restaurant, getting authentic food made by little old Japanese ladies. The udon noodles weren’t perfectly square all along like ones I’ve usually seen. These were obviously hand made, and slightly irregular, and all tapered to a flat end like a shoelace at one end (but only one end).
After this very satisfying meal we walked back to our hotel. The afternoon had warmed up and the sun had come out after being hazily overcast for most of the day. We walked down the length of the Omotecho Shopping Street, which is an old street converted into a covered pedestrian mall, lined with shops. It runs for several blocks, and seemed to have cheaper and dodgier shops at each end, with fancy fashion and other high end shops in the middle.
From there we took a different route back to our hotel. We completed check in and went up to our room to relax and cool down a bit before venturing out for dinner in the relative cool of the early evening. And after a wash and a rest we ventured back out for dinner a bit after 18:00.
We went to a place we’d passed earlier, not far from our hotel, called CBD Green. It’s a vegetarian cafe, open for dinner until 20:00. We both had the vegetable plate, which was a large plate with eight separate dishes around the edge filled with various things, with a mound of brown rice and beans in the middle. There were all sorts of pickled and sliced and marinated things, as well as a small cup of what turned out to be corn soup. There were a few things I couldn’t identify, including a weird jelly-like substance. But overall it was very good, and certainly a wide variety of flavours and textures. It was only afterwards, having spotted some "interesting" things on the menu, and then browsing around the shelves that I realised that CBD didn't mean "Central Business District", but rather cannabidiol, or cannabis oil!
On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a convenience store to pick up a couple of things we needed, and I grabbed a chocolate-coated ice cream on a stick for dessert. Now it’s time to catch up on sleep missed on the flight, and hopefully be fresh for the start of my meetings tomorrow morning.
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