After the extreme emotions of yesterday, it was already time for us to make our way home. After an absolutely gorgeous—and delicious—breakfast at our hotel, it was off to catch the Shinkansen to Himeji to visit the castle.

It was incredibly hot and humid!

Once again, we didn’t have a lot of time for the tour and our guide basically set a break-neck pace through all the major sites, up the hill, through the buildings and up 6 stories to the top. It was crazy, but worth it for the view and the history. Our guide was really great and spoke perfect English. If we only had more time…

Again, there wasn’t enough time to actually sit down and have a proper meal, but I bought a delicious Eki-ben boxed lunch at the station and ate on the train home. I stopped in at Bic Camera at Kyoto Station on the way home and bought a long sought-after Kanji dictionary for my Nintendo DS. By the time I finally got back to the dorms, I was exhausted but happy with all the wonderful experiences of our school trip. Hopefully they’ll continue the Hiroshima experience at least, but maybe with a less-aggressive schedule.