Okayama Villa Trip

After refusing so many times (well, they always set those trips on days I simply couldn't go...), on November 15th and 16th I finally went to a Okayama villa trip with the Himeji Gang (although the group changed a lot since we used that name... I wonder if we can still use it).

Well, I just didn't know that there were a group of those villas... Check here for more information. This time we went to Takebe International Villa.

I said we went, but things weren't that smooth. Excluding the fact I had to go from Kyoto to Himeji before (there was another guy who came from Nagoya, though he used the bullet train), consider that we were in three cars going there for the first time and only one had the electronic navigation system (which in some ways made us more lost than without...) and I may not have to say that we got lost quite often.

That being part of the fun, we had bento lunch at a remote controlled cars race track while wondering if we could use our cars there (haha!), had to backtrack a couple of times, look for missing cars some times more and went through narrow streets occasionally. When I say "narrow" perhaps I should give an example


Note: this is a TWO-WAY road.

In the end, we arrived safe and sound to the villa. And gladly found out we had a part of the building only for us, kitchen and common room included. I wonder if it's not the part for foreigners... the other guests I saw were all Japanese (at least they looked like). Anyway, this way we could have fun without disturbing anyone.


It was cold, so that asks for onsen and nabe! Rested and with our tummies filled, fun went on throughout good part of the night with drinking, chatting and playing games. Someone brought a card game I liked a lot. The name is 二ムト (a.k.a. Category 5) and if I find it around I'm taking it!

Another weird event was when, before we decided to go to sleep, suddenly the clock on the wall just went crazy and accellerated until two hours beyond current time. Then it just stopped. We analysed the clock and couldn't find anything wrong. We ignored what happened and continued our preparations to go to sleep when it started to move rapidly again, this time until it reached the current time, after which it slowed down and started move in its the normal pace again... Weird...

Next morning, the girls wanted to go to the onsen again. Boys didn't care much, so we slept a little more. After packing, we went to see some autumn leaves at some place close to the villa. I actually forgot the name of the place so I can't dig up information about it, but it was nice.


Last, the group decided to spend the afternoon in Kurashiki strolling around the Bikan Historical District with its kura houses and weeping willows around the canal.

After that, we all returned to Himeji; and from there some of us had still some kilometers to go. In my case, around 120km to Kyoto.

Ah, and on the way to Himeji, we were playing a game where we took turns saying names of countries, cities or states starting with some letter. The last one to give up wins the round. I have to improve my geography, but I never imagined that being Brazilian would give me some advantage (names of Brazilian of Latin-American cities that no one else there knew... I might even had made up some... Didn't do that, though). Poor Japanese were the ones with foreigners saying the names of places in their country before them... We're in Japan, after all.