Homemade Takoyaki and Nagahama Castle

Monday was a bank holiday, I forget which, so Amy invited me round for dinner. She and I were going to make takoyaki. It's a local dish that is very popular and really tasty. It consists of a sort of batter, various toppings which I don't know the names of, or even what exactly they are and octopus. They are usually spherical. I say usually because ours turned out, mostly spherical but aren't the typical example that you might expect!

 Whilst Amy and I were messing around with takoyaki making, Nam was doing some actual cooking and had prepared us a nice meal. By the time the below picture was taken, Amy and I had eaten almost all of the takoyaki already!

It was a pleasant evening, and the first time I've made takoyaki!

My week passed quite quickly and I have been very busy but I met with Amy and Tawanda on Friday for a meal and a catch-up.
The place was a chain restaurant for Gyudon which is a type of beef dish with rice. Even though it was a chain, the food was nice and we got the added bonus that it was a little bit cheaper than some of the other places you might find Gyudon.

After the meal, we decided we wanted desserts but the restaurant we were at didn't have anything besides ice cream so we googled a local place and realised it was closing in just over 12 minutes. With a 7 minute drive, we knew we'd be cutting it fine.

Somehow, we arrived just in time and in tact - bursting through the front doors before the shop closed. We found ourselves in a really cute bakery with a cafe section which was closed.

The bakery had some amazing looking cakes and confectionery, I bought a chocolate cake (no surprises there) and some biscuits to give to one of my colleagues family. We all piled out of the shop again and sat in the car to eat our desserts whilst the woman closed up the shop.

I'd barely taken a bite of my delicious chocolate cake when we all realised that we looked really weird, since we were in the car parking space directly in front of the shop, eating our cakes and the shop owner was walking up to the window whilst closing shop. In fits of laughter at how strange we must seem to her, we drove back to the previous restaurant where we could eat without freaking out the dessert shop owner!

I was talking about going on a train journey this weekend and Amy suggested I buy an ICOCA. It's similar to an Oyster card in that you top it up as you go and tap in and out but is used for trains all over Japan. We decided to go on a special trip to get an ICOCA from Nagahama station on the way home. As Tawanda lives close to where we already were, she went home and Amy and I set out on our quest.

It was easy to buy and I've used it so much already! Another plus is that you can use it on vending machines and in certain shops to make purchases too - although I haven't needed to use it for that yet. The station also had some mosaic art - there were lots of different ones but this is the one I took a picture of: 

After that, we meandered through the shopping centre which is right next to the station. There was a hundred yen store that we tried not to buy everything in before we saw this Taiko arcade game right outside the store. We had to play since we saw the Prisoner of Love title and wanted to know what it meant!

We never did find out. I couldn't stop laughing the whole play through since we were in the middle of this really quiet shopping centre, with very few people around besides a shop clerk whose counter was situated close by and had to suffer through our 'drumming'. Saying that, we aced the first song. I may have made a mistake by getting a little too cocky and choosing a hard song to follow it which ended our playing early - but it was fun whilst it lasted.

Since we were right next to Nagahama Castle, we wandered over to see the castle all lit up.

Every day I drive past this castle to get to work and I always wanted to wander around. It's a lot smaller than Hikone castle and it never seems to be busy with a lot of visitors whenever I go past but the architecture makes it really interesting to see lit up.

I always see a shrine gate when I drive past and we tried to find the entrance. When we found it, we went to explore but it was really dark so we couldn't really see anything there. Since it was so dark, we both freaked each other out and left before we could look around more but we've resolved to revisit it soon...