JapanJonesFamily: Oshi Castle

A couple weeks ago, Mike's assistant took us up to the Oshi castle, near Gyoda, which is about an hour away. Last week, Mike was on-call for Memorial Day weekend, so we didn't do too much. But here are some pictures from the past couple of weeks.

These fish statues were on the outside of the castle at one time.

Weber and Mensah, two other dentists, in front of a norimono. They used to carry royalty around in this little box.

Mike took a picture of one of the swords, but apparently, according to the sign written in Japanese, you weren't supposed to.

Outside the door of the castle

In front of the castle, with the other dentists and tour guide

It's nice having someone that can speak Japanese with you. Kaorie talked to the tour guide and another guy and they were happy to let us try on part of a Samaria outfit. Here's Mike with his mean Samaria face.

I just felt ridiculous and couldn't stop laughing. The helmets were surprisingly heavy.

For lunch, we had a rice and meat meal. It was different from other Japanese meals we have had. Annabelle was trying to dig into someone else's gelatinous custardy cream of chickeny dish.

We had a rice dish with chicken or fish, pickled somethings, a salad, miso soup, a fish tail (with all of the bones), the custard dish, and a slice of grapefruit. Most of it was pretty good, but I still couldn't eat everything.

Near the castle, are some mounds in which important people in 400-600 AD were buried. Annabelle walked up all of the steps.

A replica of how they were buried.

Along the way, we also visited a sweets shop famous for their rice covered bean paste treats (they write the name of the castle on the rice). We also picked up this muffin. The bean paste still taste like bean paste to us, but Mike liked the muffin.

I wanted ice cream one night so we went to a new Japanese convenience store on base (they built it for all of the Japanese military on base) and got all this stuff. There was peach favored ice, which Eedie loved, an ice sorbet sort of thing, and Coolish in strawberry flavor. Coolish has become our new favorite ice cream.

Eedie didn't want any of the other ice cream so I gave her one of these miniature ice cream cones. You can tell form the picture, but these are only about 4 inches tall.

Annabelle was pushing Eedie around in her doll stroller. Eedie didn't mind at first, but then she just started freaking out, while she still had cereal in her mouth. =)