I didn’t post yesterday because it was a travel day. My wife and I flew out from Sydney to Tokyo in the evening. Before that, we dropped Scully off at a friend’s place. We stopped off on the way at our favourite Italian bakery to get a selection of small morsels: mini cannolis, tarts, cakes, slices, and so on. At their house we had a morning tea while we watched Scully and their dog go berserk playing with each other. The two dogs get along really well and don’t get to see each other very often, so they go a bit bananas when they do.
After a bit of a catch up with our friends, we left Scully there and headed home to finish packing for the trip. We had plenty of time as our flight didn’t leave until after 8pm. I even managed to clean the house, wash and dry all the dirty dishes and cutlery, vacuum, and so on, so that we actually come back to a clean house (for once!).
We caught the train to the airport, where it wasn’t busy at all. We had already checked in and gotten digital boarding passes online, so we went straight through customs and the security check, and were done and inside the terminal within about 5 minutes. So we had plenty of time to kill before boarding our flight. My wife grabbed a coffee and then we walked around the various shops for a bit. Eventually we were hungry enough for dinner and went to a bistro where we both ordered caesar salads, because we didn’t want anything too heavy just before a flight. We boarded our plane and were airborne by 08:30 or so.
The flight was a little bumpy, but fine. It seemed we made some time, because we arrived in Haneda Airport in Tokyo a bit earlier than scheduled, close to 5am 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 train to Shinagawa and there bought Shinkansen tickets for the bullet train to Okayama. Inside the station we grabbed a pre-packed bento box for me and some kelp onigiri for my wife for a breakfast on-the-go.
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 next to a young Japanese guy. The train hurtled us along the tracks to Nagoya, where several people got out and we switched to the other 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 3pm. 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. We went inside, and it’s interesting with several museum displays of samurai-era artefacts, but you can tell it’s a modern building, not something centuries old.
After this we visited the garden, which is one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan, and definitely worthy of that title it is.
It’s quite large, built around 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. We left 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 6 words of English between them. The place only had Japanese signage, but Google Maps tells me it’s called Shiromi-Chaya. My wife 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 that I couldn’t identify.
It 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 handmade, 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 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.
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.
(No comic updates because I’m overseas and don’t have access to my copy/paste template.)