With another castle blog post. I'm aware that the people most excited about these are probably my male tween readers and the male middle aged who have fond memories of being male tweens when Friday nights were consumed by marathon Dungeon and Dragons sessions with several 2 liters of Mountain Dew and Dominos pizzas. Or at least that's what I've heard.
Before you reach the castle, you are forced to march through a warren of restaurants and shops designed to sap your energy and yen. This strategy dates back to the 1600s, when invading armies were forced to approach the castle the same way, and probably explains why Inuyama was never successfully conquered.
Lily getting to experience how things were when I was 13. "How do you text with this thing?!"
You know you have a teenage daughter when her quip is ... hey look, it's a pothead.
When I visit castles, I always imagine twin two year-olds running down the hallways with their diapers held high above their heads, chased by an overtired shogun.
Inuyama castle is on the outskirts of Nagoya, about an hour north of us by train.
Looking at the somnolent pose, who could argue with her?
Finally, tired and several thousand yen poorer, we reached the castle. Inuyama castle is one of the five remaining original Japanese castles, the others having been destroyed by fire, war, or fire and war.
Inuyama was established in 1537. It started the way all Japanese castles seem to start. A shogun shows up and plants a hut on top of a hill. Then a bigger shogun comes along, kicks that shogun out, and builds an addition on the hut. And so on ...
The armory, where the Shogun probably spent a lot of time (especially when the twins were awake).
On the castle balcony. Lily spent most of our time staring at the rickety wooden railing and repeating "this was built exactly when, again?" and "when they say 'original' do they mean this railing?"
I spent my time repeating "don't tell mom what we did" and "it'll be fine" while pressing my back to the wall.
Safe on the ground. Ready for sugar.
Lily and I then walked to the Urakuen Garden, where the aptly named cherry blossom trees were just blossoming.
Lily discovered a water feature (Amy is always clamoring for a water feature in our garden at home). I am always hoping that pictures of water features will suffice.
For Lois.
For Kathy.
"You cannot start a paragraph with my name," Lily said at one point, anticipating that any such paragraph would include details that might be embarrassing to the teen set. As I've said all along, I'm willing to accommodate certain requests in the most literal way possible. Unbeknownst to me (been wanting to get unbeknownst into a post), Lily's true intent in accompanying me was to conduct a field experiment on the correlation between sugar intake and STU (sudden total unconsciousness).
As you can see, the experiment was an unqualified success.
I was later asked by Amy whether I managed to get her to eat anything healthy.
There's dairy in whipped cream right? Dairy is healthy, right?
The next day, Lily said that she wanted to replicate her findings with hot chocolate and a chocolate muffin.
I sometimes wonder about the long term health effects of repeated sugar comas.
However, I reassure myself by thinking that it is more likely that Lily has experienced a years-long sugar coma punctuated by brief periods of consciousness.
I can't explain why this is reassuring.
