Jes Visits! - Himeji

So while Jes was here, her, Roxanne, and myself went to Himeji, a city to the South where Himeji castle is located.
As you approach the castle, there's a large field that was probably used as a staging ground or something. It's just a big dirt field. You can see Jes wearing her new jacket in the center of the picture at left. This is a panorama that is composed of, I think, 12 different pictures.

As you come closer to the castle, you can see some of the battlements and the arrow slits and stone-throwing holes and suchlike. At left, Jes is just about to look out one, and you can see another square one at the right side of the frame. There were circular, rectangular, and triangular slits. I would guess they were for different purposes, but I don't know how those specific shapes would be advantageous to anything.

At right is a sign that I liked for the "No danger!" symbol in the lower right. The blue text above the sign says "Plastic bottles are allowed".

This just occurred to me now, but the walk up the walkways was pretty tiring as-is, so I can't imagine what this would be like while constantly trying to dodge rocks and arrows and oil and fighting well-rested sword-/pike-men.

Oh, feel free to add musketeers to that list as well.

This was one rack of guns that was to be seen, but there were probably racks for well over a thousand longarms such as this.

This is "Princess Sen's room" or one of them. She had a whole section of the castle devoted to her and her serving girls, if the signs are to be believed. I don't know what she's doing with the rocks, but I would guess it's some kind of prayer ritual or something like that.

This room is not very high up in the castle and kind of off to one side, but as you go up into the main castle area, you see these little fish guys (left) at random. I think they signify some kind of dolphin (though the tails are sideways for that) or dragon or something. I dunno.

Of the stuff at the castle, I think these fishy statues are probably the most artistic, useless thing there. The rest is fairly bland and militaristic, largely because it consists of empty rooms and hallways.

And doors like the one seen at right. They still work, I think, but were locked so you couldn't open them.

From the top, you have a great view of the city, and I managed to get something like a 280-degree panorama, as you can see.

On the way down, we saw a couple of really neat sights, and I got what is probably my favorite picture of the castle proper, at left. The sunset is what's causing it to turn that nice orange color, though I think they have lights that come on at night to keep it that color. If not, I don't know what they use the massive lightbanks that they had set up for.

Here's that same sunset, a few minutes later, looking the other direction.

And some cats we found. A little after us, an old guy came with two little girls and they fed the cats.

These pictures could really use some warming up, but I guess I missed that when I was working through this set. Oops.

And then there's the toilet. We went to an okonomiyaki place on the way back to the train station, and the place we ate had this toilet. The picture at right really doesn't do the horror of the thing justice, but suffice to say that it had the strangest color scheme of any bathroom I've ever seen.

On top of that, the girls commented that the toilet was kidn of strange, so I had to go investigate. It turns out that it's an old-style toilet with what something like a booster seat on it so that you can sit down like a Western-style toilet. I moved the seat aside for this picture so you can see sort of what's going on. And yes, I washed my hands afterwards.