The Other Castle

Today we went to Inuyama. There's a festival going on right now, but I'm not sure why. Probably for the cherry blossoms and spring in general. They had these huge floats that were basically a wooden cart, 30 feet high, with puppets on top. They would start in front of the shrine, do a puppet show, start playing music involving something-resembling-a-flute players and drum playing children riding the thing, and then start pulling it down the street. But not before a bunch of young men lifted it up onto a wheelie, spun it around, and started pulling it down the street in this manner. I shit you not. These things' wheels don't turn, so they just turn them like Hot Wheels cars. And those videos are pretty much exactly what it's like to be there. It's just nowhere near as weird seeming in person. When you're there the whole thing seems like a fairly normal thing to do. The atmosphere was comparable to Wellsburg's Applefest.

Follow the festival and you'll end up at a shrine, which leads to the castle, one of the oldest in Japan and a National Treasure. This one is a bit cooler than Nagoya castle in that fact. It was not destroyed and "rebuilt" in the last century, and every part of it is around 400 years old. Unfortunately, it's mostly empty. Probably because of it's age, it is unsuitable as a museum environment (the building is not "sealed" like a modern structure). Nagoya castle is cooler in that it has lots of cool stuff in it (specifically swords). All the castles around here seem to have something to do with the Oda clan, which produced the serious badass, Oda Nobunaga, who was one of three generals who resulted in a unified Japan. The whole Sengoku Jidai is very interesting. Awesome reading material, which has also has a lot of really cool modern interpretations. Oda Nobunaga lived in Nagoya Castle, I hear.

I ate lots of cool food. First some okonomiyaki, which is always delicious, and which also had some yakisoba in it (also delicious). I washed that down with an Asahi beer. They apparently have no public drinking laws here. Also, I was not carded, and hear Joe never been either. They either don't care, or are overestimating our ages. I tried a corndog, which was labeled as an "American Dog". It really wasn't any better. And the mustard was HOT in that horseradish-type way. I washed that down with a snow cone, the syrup for which was extremely thick and sweet. Not watery like in America. Just outside the train station on the way home, I grabbed a can of Pepsi from a vending machine. They're 500ml here!

So, the day overall didn't involve a lot of various things. Just being there for a long while. And train rides. Look through albums I'm tagged in on facebook for photos, as my camera is still broken. I'm in the middle of a back-and-forth with Nikon US about what to do about that.