Nijo Castle - Kyoto - TravBuddy

The Nijo castle has one of the best English brochures I’ve seen from Japan, :) which is nice! When I pictured castle I imagined this huge fortress but the only thing ‘castle-like’ is the moat around the building and the huge door other than that it looks like a traditional Japanese building on the inside but it’s still very pretty. It’s a cheap 500Yen (about $5.00 USD) to get in to the building and take a look around. The grounds for this castle are huge 275,000 square meters (about 68 acres). There are gardens, palaces, and ponds… there is so much to look at so when you visit set aside a few hours to be able to see most of it. My favorite part about the entire Nijo Castle was in the main palace, Ninomaru Palace. They built the floors so when someone walks on the corridor it squeaks which is called the Nightingale floor. The purpose is to alert the people of intruders. It sounds like squeaking birds, tons of them. The palace was pretty amazing, lots of great old rooms and paintings…but a lot of it, sadly I got a little bored with it after the 11th room or so, there’s something like 33 rooms… there are 800 tatami mats. Anywho, it’s pretty cool to walk through and see a castle that was originally built in 1603! Now that’s old!
All in all I had a pretty good time, too much to take in and a lot of people!