Japan Day 4: Short Adventures In Himeji and Kobe

I woke up this morning feeling like absolute garbage, my nose was running like a faucet, I had a fever, and my whole body ached. Not ideal when you only have a few days to explore a country. I took some DayQuil, and decided to tackle the day.

Our first stop for the day was Himeji, which is located a little over an hour away from Osaka by train. The train was crowded but luckily we managed to snag some seats after the first stop because I would not have been able to stand for a whole hour. My drugs started to kick in somewhere along the way so I wasn’t feeling too bad by the time we arrived at our destination.

We had one goal for our time in Himeji and that was to see the castle. We walked out of the station and could see it immediately; only problem was the entire thing was covered by a large scaffold structure for renovation works so you couldn’t see a thing. We walked all the way to the castle any way thinking there might be more to see. The property is surrounded by a moat and we had to cross a bridge to get inside the castle grounds, which was pretty cool, and the grounds themselves were quite nice but the fact that you couldn’t actually see the castle was very disappointing. The best part of it all is they were still charging admission to access the interior of the castle even though much of that was off limits as well. We wandered around the area of the castle for a little while, and had a nice talk with a local man who seemed to want to practice his English before heading back to the train station.

Our next stop of the day was Kobe. Neither of us had anything we really wanted to see in Kobe we just thought we would stop there for lunch to break up the trip home, and maybe try some Kobe beef. We wandered down to the waterfront and took some pictures then explored the pier trying to find an option for food. Most places seemed to be out of our price range so we didn’t ended up trying Kobe beef and instead made our way back to the train station.

By this point in the day the drugs I had taken earlier on were starting to wear off and I was going downhill quickly. We grabbed a cheap lunch from a bakery at the train station and started to make our way back to Osaka. Dom continued exploring for a few hours once we returned but I headed straight to bed where I stayed for the rest of the day. It would have been nice to see more of Osaka but I figured I had already made an effort to see some things earlier in the day and it was probably better to get some rest than to push on and feel even worse tomorrow.

Hopefully I will feel better tomorrow because I need to squeeze as much of Osaka as I possible can into the day. Wish me luck!