today not much happened. reason is, we took the train back to the east, heading to wakayama. since we arrived there pretty late, all that was left to do was to check in at the hotel,and walk around a little bit. wakamaya turns out to be some kind of a ghost town, at least as soon as you leave the station area. and although it was around four in the afternoon during the week, all shops were closed, no people or cars on the streets. really weird. and once we spotted some people, they gave us pretty strange looks, like they never have seen any gaijins around here. well, maybe they really never have? hmmm.... now one may ask why we got to this ghost town at all. well, this will be revealed in tomorrow's bLog entry. uuuuh, i'm so looking forward to tomorrow... so now here's what wakayama has to offer. first of all, a beautiful park[05-12,29-40] with awesome camphor, and of course many other trees. i like the trees here. and then there's also wakayama castle[14-28,38-40]. a nice idyllic small castle, compared to nijo-jo castle we have visited on day 08 of our trip. the entrance was cheap, and they had a hello kitty popcorn vending machine there. inside the castle we were almost the only ones, and one could go up the roof to enjoy a good view[19-20,22-24] over wakayama. also at the castle we got loads of strange looks, but by now we already got used to that. and then there's some more excellent examples of the most elaborated art of engrish. signs saying things like "i am careful in a head"[17], or "wicket"[27] are found quite often and always a pleasure to read (and most often even more fun to decipher their meaning). inside the castle taking pictures was prohibited. and although, as already mentioned, we were the only ones, and there were no CCTVs, we respected that and took no pictures of ancient samurai armours and armoury, nice wall paintings, and old scrolls with beautiful drawings and japanese texts. after the visit to the castle we went home by foot. our hotel was near to the castle, so it did not take that long. still no people on the street, and we wondered were to get some food, as ninsti was already hungry. fortunately there was a japanese restaurant in the same street as our hotel. and there we tried all kind of foods again. from deep fried chicken, salad, dumplings, tuna sashimi, mackerel - as always totally nomnomnom. since that was pretty much all about wakayama, here's some more observations about japanese people or culture. firstly, train staff is bowing when they enter a train compartment. and they bow when they leave the compartment. nice gesture, but actually no ones cares. except for me. i bowed back at them, but they in return did not notice, because they bowed so low, they did not see me, and turned around pretty fast once they straightened up again. so... lots of bowing, no one cares. secondly there's this big discrepancy between women's and men's public toilets. while women sometimes have those toilets that generate some noise so that no one can hear them peeing, toilets for men are usually always pretty open, and one easily feels like peeing in public. slide 35 is a good example for that. i do not know why it is that way, we had to conjecture that either it keeps men from masturbating, or dealing drugs, or something we would not think of. another example is the urinal on the train. it has a glass window. admittedly, one does not feel that exposed here, as one stands in there with the back facing the window, but then again, compared to the ladies bathroom, fully protected from any views and listening, it is quite the contrast. but the good thing is, there's public toilets everywhere. we really appreciate that. a lot. ok, time to go to bed so tomorrow's here soon. yippieh!