Hello, Kochi!

This weekend was a long one here in Japan! Today (Monday) is a national holiday for Seamen! In the past, the holiday actually fell on my birthday (July 20th!), but some years ago the Japanese government switched a bunch of national holidays to Mondays to increase the annual number of three-day weekends. I guess that's a good thing, even if it does mean sacrificing my birthday as a holiday... Anyways, having an extra day to play with, I headed off to Kochi City for the first time with Rebecca and Heather!

First , we checked out Kochi Castle, one of the few remaining original castles in Japan. The sceptic says that once you've seen one, you've seen them all, but it still had a certain charm of its own to behold.

At the bottom of the castle, we did our best at imitating the pose of the statute. Apparently, this is quite a popular Japanese pasttime, as - on the climb up - I counted at least three Japanese couples adorably doing the same. Or perhaps we're just trend-setters.

This was us at the top!

After climbing all the way to the top of the castle in the summer heat, there was only one thing on our collective mind: LUNCH. For this particular lunch, we ate some katuso no tataki, the local speciality. It's katsuo sashimi which has been seared around the edges, so it's cooked on the outside and raw on the inside... delicious! The restaurant where we lunched was pretty hip, too: they had an old record player, and stacks of old Boney M and Earth, Wind and Fire LPs.

おいしい！！

We also made time for everyone's favourite holiday souvenir... a bit of puri-kura. I didn't input my name quickly enough, so for this one, I'm "Ji". A year on and seeing yourself with artificially flawless skin still hasn't gotten old.

In the evening we headed to a Jamaican club, where we danced with some of the locals! They must have taken almost a hundred photos of us on their phones ("CUTE CUTE", "IKEMEN IKEMEN"). We were too busy dancing to take any of our own, so we just texted Yuki (above) the next day and asked him to send us some of his snaps. Et voila!

<3

The morning after, we also found this really cute little coffee shop...!

This cake was called "The Sound of Music". Cue identical foody pose:

Taking my first bite was something akin to taking the cinnamon challenge, as I inhaled a mouthful of chocolate powder and spluttered everywhere. A messy end to a perfect weekend!