Oh baby, I don't care!

Days 8&9
I awoke sometime the next afternoon, surprisingly not hungover (win).
Spruced myself and my room then went to check on the other gai-jin, Sam-san seemed find, then Tom-san rocked up looking rather sheepish, it transpired that he'd chundered twice, tut tut.

So, what to do with the day?

Lunch seemed the most pressing matter so we went looking for it.
We decided on Lotteria, looked a bit McDonald's-y, I went for the ULTIMATE CHEESEBURGER, it wasn't too ultimate but it filled a void.
Oh yeah, Sam-san ate meat, he too went for the ultimate cheeseburger.

Post-lunch, I kicked ass at bowling.

Then we spent a good 2 hours in the second-hand shop.
Gamecubes for 400円, porn in great abundance for even less, electronic trumpets, hawaiian kimonos and a little robot that follows you round with beer were just the lowlights.
Tom-san agonised over a 3,000円 acoustic but decided to leave it for another day.

An obligatory trip to Halow's followed where we bought beer for the evening and Tom-san continued his russian roulette of Japanese sweets.

You guessed it, dried fish, this time with the texture of old boots.
Yum.

After a number of beers, a few instant ramen and copious amounts of banter we hit the hay, ready for Okayama in the morn.

So we thought we were meeting Yugo-san at 1300 at the station, it got to 1330 and there was still no sign, we feared the worst: the last we'd seen of him was his drunken stagger in the darkness of Friday night.
Bravely we soldiered on to Okayama alone.
Gai-jins on tour.

A few steps out of Okayama station and who do we see?

Momotaro-san! With his kibi dango out for all to see.

After quite a lot of dithering and attempts to decipher Japanese maps (3 maps, each of a different orientation - who the hell puts North anywhere but the top?!) we found a route to the castle and gardens.

Whilst walking down Momotaro boulevard or whatever it's called, I was approached by a Japanese girl, Noriko, who thought I'd been brought in as a guest for her English class's barbecue, she was sadly disappointed but helped us on our way to the castle regardless, and we're facebook friends for evermore, yay!

Eventually we saw the castle peeping above the trees with a lovely little river, I was very interested in the bridge, being something of a budding engineer.
I'll add pictures when I get round to it.

The castle and gardens were perfectly nice, if you're into the kind of thing.
Walking back into the city centre, we saw a lovely log covered in caterpillars. Sam-san almost put his hand on it.
It was pretty nasty.

Back in Okayama we had to seek out some food, it consisted of some grizzly-looking meat and some so-so udon, but it filled a hole so nimind.

After more photography of momotaro-san and his many friends we headed back to Nakasho, bought some discount Halow's burgers then headed to the party pad and hit the hay to be ready for the off on Monday morn.