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Family Outing 1: Odawara Castle

It’s been a while since I updated our blog. Lots of things happened and places visited. Since things has gotten better and got more free time (Praise God!), we will be able to start recording our experiences again.

A year before our son born, we planned to visit Malaysia and Singapore. It was discontinued as Elaine got pregnant and it would be dangerous for her to travel. Our tour was postponed and moved to the following year (that is 2014). Thinking that it will be a challenge for us to travel with a baby, we did a some kind “dry-run” on how are we proceeded on our outing. We didn’t know what should be done as this was our first time to travel as a family so we started on place a bit near from our home, Odawara Castle. This time, I tried using the baby carrier on Joshua to see if I can endure carrying him throughout the day.

Odawara castle is one and half hour train ride from our house. It was also an important site in Japan during their Warring states period, so visiting this site would give us an idea what was the life in Japan 600 years ago. From Odawara Station, the castle is around 15 minutes walk. Lots of signage are present that directs the visitors to the castle so we no longer need to use GPS.

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It was raining when we arrived in the castle area, so we had to stay for a while before moving forward. We initially thought that we can enter the castle immediately but not. We had to walk around the area before reaching the premises. We searched for ticket vendor but found none. Looking around, we found a ticket vending machine so we bought our ticket from it. In Japan, people are fond of vending machine, that they even sell not just tickets and drinks but also ice cream, meal, newspaper – even souvenirs.

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Walking to the main castle, we encountered some of the stuffs that gave us hints how Japanese architecture looks like centuries ago.  Though it has modernized, their way on doing things are almost the same until today.

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Along the way, there was a museum dedicated for Odawara City. Inside it are some artifacts, presentation and diorama of Odawara from the old days to modern day era. Here are the stuffs we found in this museum.

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Moving forward, we finally reached the entrance of castle itself. We took photo for a while before finally climbing up to the gate because it was the best place to view the whole castle.

Odawara Castle

Unfortunately, when we were about to enter the premises, we were  asked to not to take photo of what’s inside. Unlike other castles, the guards here were vigilant and roaming lots of time every floor to ensure that photos could not be taken. We were only to allowed to get photo when we arrived at the top – the castle’s souvenir store. Well, we were able to get rest finally after climbing stairs from base to the top of the castle.

After Odawara, we set ourselves to stay in a pension house in  Hakone for the next part of our family outing.

 

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