Hikone

Chynna stayed at our apartment and joined us for a day trip to Hikone. A town on the shores of Japan’s biggest lake, Lake Biwa. It is also home to a castle like Himeji but a lot smaller. Himeji is currently getting renovated so we thought it was worth the visit to check out the strategic designs inside of a defensive castle.

I love that they kept the natural formations of tree trunks into the roof scaffolding.

The mascot for Hikone Castle came out to do some charade thing. He was adorable but mid-way I stopped and laughed because…. the whole audience comprised of adults. Not one child in sight. In Australia, mascots would be aimed towards kids but here – it works on everybody.

We did start to get silly with our walking bamboo sticks and being in a military castle.

Afterwards we roamed around Castle Road and got soba noodles for lunch. It was definitely a sleepy town as 50% of the shops weren’t even open. Maybe it’s getting towards down season for them. We did eat some amazing patisserie before jumping back on the train to get back home. It was a decent train ride of 1.5 hours on the JR Biwako Line from Kyoto (also covered by the JR Rail Pass). I think the other option is to get a shinkansen to Maibara and then getting a train to go back one stop, but timing it all together still eats up quite a lot of time.

Cutest little Mexican stand. It was actually a food truck, a very very puny food truck if you can see. I don’t know how he can make food in there.