Totoro To-to-ro...

After the wedding the whole English side of the family spent the day in Nara and went up to the park where there's a lot of fairly tame deer.  Which I didn't take any pictures of on digital. Damn!
(Me and Row have several cameras between us so the pictures are a bit jumbled.)
In fact I think there are a lot of pictures from that day on film so here are just a couple:

Rowan spotted an awesome beetle!

In the cafe where we stopped for lunch they had cats on the light-switches! I like a lot.

I planned on taking pictures of all the exciting food I had but here we had curry which looks disgusting in the photo even though it was really delicious. 

Inside Kofukuji Temple

Outide Kofukuji Temple

We stopped off at a service station for lunch. Why do they not serve food like this at 'Welcome Break' and stuff?! And I think it was cheaper than a panini from Costa as well!

The next day we visited Himeji Castle which is sadly covered in scaffolding at the moment but still pretty cool with a lovely view. You go up in a lift with a glass wall so you see all the layers of stones in the castle and then they have built this observation building so you can look close up at the roof and how the reconstruction happens.

Rowan and his godson

 We also visited Bizen to see the pottery. But I was more interested in the plantpot...

One of the Bizen potters at work... I bought a teeny little cat since it was all a bit out of my price range

Okonomiyaki which is described as a pancake or a pizza but it just isn't! It is egg and lettuce and port and some sort of brown sauce, pickled ginger and you drizzle mayo all over it as well?! But actually delicious and so filling!

This was a little cafe right by the pottery area. I love how you are given free water and often green tea with your food. That is just how it should be. 

It was when we were in here that we saw on the news about one of the quite large aftershocks. Being in the Kansai district, we didn't really see any of the aftereffects of the tsunami and we couldn't feel any tremors. The main things we noticed were that a) we were basically the only Westerners wherever we went and b) people coming up to us to practice there English was always ask us to tell everyone at home that it is safe to visit Japan and safe to trade (after asking if we knew David Beckham/ Prince Charles etc.) So I know I haven't really been talking about the tsunami, but that is just because on our trip everything has been continuing as normal.

After the pottery we decided to stop off at the Okayama Korakuen Garden which was extremely pretty... 

Koi!

=^..^=

We were staying up into the countryside to a place called Hattoji which was basically just like My Neighbor Totoro (if you haven't see it, go and watch it right now.)

The house in Totoro

We went for a nice cycle ride and there was a shrine up a hill just next to us and lots of pretty streams. More pictures soon but here are a couple of the inside for now:

The table with blankets just in front of me is the most awesome thing. It is heated from the underside so you all sit around it with your legs underneath since it gets pretty cold at night, even at this time of year! And we cooked a lot of out food on that open fire in the middle there and sat on cushions eating around it

This was our room.

This is like the 'master bedroom'

This is what we did.

AND THIS IS THE BATH!

Just like this!

The bath was so awesome its basically worth going just for that. Its a massive metal barrel thing which is really deep, sitting at the bottom of it I had to tilt my head back to keep my mouth out of the water, and its almost as good as going to the onsen!

LOADS more pictures to come for this one!

xxx