day 15 - castles without end

18/06/07 19:17
another online exclusive since i`m sitting in front of the pc right now anyway. today ootsuki-san took me to hikone, a city with about 100000 people in the shiga-prefecture (i`m collecting prefectures, which are like the german bundeslaender. well maybe more like the german regierungsbezirke. so far i`ve been in osaka, kyoto, shiga, hyogo and nother one). which btw. reminds me to tell you how stupid the japanese number system is. they`ve got it pretty normal till 9999, same way we do it here. but after that they have another step which destroys all that follows up. where we say "ten thousand" they say "ichi man" (aka one tenthousand). 100000 is "juu man" (ten tenthousand). a million is hundred tenthousand, ten million are thousand tenthousand and at 100 million they finally have their next step, "ichi oku". now try telling them that there are 80 million people in germany. sucks. anyway, back to hikone. it`s apparently an old city and it has a wellknown castle, which we visited. if you`ve been keeping count, my fourth castle so far. not bad at all. the castle was nice and what stood out were the stairs. cause they went up at an angle of about 80 degrees i`d say. good for keeping off invading enemies, bad for everyday life. and tourists. before we went there we had lunch in a restaurant. and what i forgot: ootsuki-sans car. a mercedes slk, two seats. very impressive, probably very expensive, but the first thing he says "sorry for the small car, but since the kids moved out we don`t need much space anymore". yeaaahh. typically japanese, though. the rainy season started kicking in today, but we were spared the worst. on the way back we passed the biwako lake, the biggest one in japan, and we drove a bit around kyoto, looking at some temples. then we got back, first to his company and then here. the company makes the electronic paying systems that are used at every golf course in japan. there are many golf courses in japan. one thing that i might mention is the dog of the family. it`s a small chihuahua or however that is spelled, full of energy and always running around. and it looks like its tongue is too long for its mouth, because it`s always hanging out at one corner of the mouth, making him look really weird and stupid and funny in some way. i`ll be sure to take a picture because it`s just hilarious. (woo, caught up!!)