The following is a kind of long and probably not all that interesting account of the trip to the castle town of Shiroishi. I'll get some pictures in there later.

9:26
On a local train headed for some castle that I haven't actually picked up the name of yet. I'v heard it, but as with all Japanese it takes a concious effort to actually *hear* it. "...people hearing withot listening..."
In any case I'm sitting here with a largish group of friends. A minute ago Tim passed a bag of pocky around (thanks Tim), so we were a big group of gaijin on a local train all munching pocky. That must have been a sight.
A typical Japanese cell phone ornament is dangling from my pda, it's a small blue cat with a big pile of pancakes on a green plate. Got it yesterday when I bought a bottle of tea.

10:44
Name is shiroishi (white rock). We just saw the residence of a minor samurai. Seemed like a very cold place to live in winter. We're now walking towards the castle. Just passed a big concrete toori.
Ah, here we are. This place looks nice. Jeff and Tim are considering scaling the wall like ninjas.

10:57
Entering castle. The inner gate is larger than the outer one, lots of little windows for arrowing people stuck in between the gates. Inside the gates is a nice park where the castle buildings once stood. Wouldn't mind laying down for a nap on the lawn right now.
In the middle there is a tall thin stone monument in memory of... something.

11:09
So apparently the walls are made from bamboo, clay straw rope and plaster. Clay blocks are tied to a bamboo frame and covered by plaster. Thickness: 24 cm.

11:17
Top floor, nice cool breeze. Pretty views in all directions. We just got the chance to take pictures of Haesung with samurai helmet and sword. Ok, going down again. Leaving. Battery just ran out in my camera, will have to dig the extra out of my backpack.

11:37
So somebody just found 3000 yen in a trash can and, instead of just taking it, just pointed out that there's a bunch of money in the garbage. By now Angelo's got it, after reporting it to the museum attendant who said to keep it.

11:58
Waiting for a movie "The Demon Lord Kojuro" about some feudal lord. Everybody's wearing these cool looking 3d glasses like proper nerds.

12:50
The movie reminded of a typical Japanese samurai drama except for two things: 1) a guy in a suit was explaining the historical background and 2) 3d. Yay, bad acting that really gets in your face. In one scene the lord was sitting on a horse talking to some soldier, this was funny since he obviously didn't have much experience with riding.
Right now people are having lunch (I've just enough cash on me to get back to Sendai and don't like borrowing when I don't have to, so I'm having a cup of tea.) and afterwards we're walking over to some swordmaker's place. That'll be interesting. Hopefully I can get some good reference pictures for modelling swords in Blender. Time for another cup of tea.

17:47
Finally back in my room again, sweaty and tired, but in general happy with the day. Seeing the swordmaking was nice, kind of long though (we didn't see the entire process since that takes about ten days) and it was very hot and humid today. This explain the sweaty part. The tired comes from simple lack of sleep (since yesterday was Ghibli night and we got started on the movie kind of late). Sitting here working my way through a liter of milk, after which I hopefully will have awoken enough to go shower.