Day 3 Himeji Castle
There were two things on our agenda today – visit Himeji Castle and shopping at Den Den Town. However we left our apartment relatively late and after spending more than 20 minutes exchanging our rail passes at Shinosaka station, we could only catch the 12 noon train to Himeji.
Thankfully the trip only took about 30 minutes. From the station it was a nice one kilometre walk to the Himeji Castle premises. I have been wanting to visit this castle since I planned my first trip to Japan in 2004 and after going through 5 years of renovation, it is finally open to public again this March.
Himeji is also home to a law school so along the road you will come across bronze statues in various positions representing the word ‘Think’.
Himeji Castle is as beautiful as it is well preserved for a 1,300 years old structure made entirely of wood. We paid the ¥1000 entrance fees to climb the six storey structure and catch a glimpse of the entire Himeji town. Totally worth the visit though time wasn’t on our side for pretty much our whole trip.
We had to change out of our footwear and wear slip ons offered by the attendants which didn’t provide very good grip especially since we had to scale many levels of steep stairs. Definitely for acrophobics and claustrophobics.
By the time we were done with Himeji, we hurried back to Osaka but decided to try the JR line instead since we had already activated our passes. It was a big mistake. JR lines aren’t very useful within Osaka city compared to Tokyo since much of the inner city is serviced by the subway line. We ended up making a super big detour to Namba which took us more than one hour.
From Namba, we found our way to Mandarake in Shinsaibashi. I found a pretty good deal for a Aries Mu god cloth series for ¥9000. However decided to hold back till I saw Den Den Town. After Mandarake, we headed to BIC Camera which was near Namba. It seemed to have a better selection than Yodobashi and cheaper too especially for Pokemon items.
Dinner was at an Italian restaurant in Namba and after dinner we managed to catch up with my brother in law and girlfriend across the canal at Dotonburi queuing up for dinner. Gosh I miss those days of gallavanting freely just Theo and I. Now we have so many bodies to feed and mobilise that it takes forever to get to a place. Maybe that is why it is too ambitious to plan more than two destinations in one day.