Hiroshima Trip, Day 2

The next day started out with a breakfast buffet at the hotel. These places usually get a lot of international guests, so their breakfast items skew a bit more western than is usual for places in Japan. I took advantage of the circumstance to have my first bowl of cereal since mid-September. It had been so long!

One of the many memorials for the bomb victims.

Most of the day was focused on highly depressing World War II A-bomb exhibitions. We went to a number of museums and peace memorials and talked with an A-bomb survivor who was just a little girl 2.4 kilometers away from the bomb when it went off. We also heard a talk from Dr. Robert Jacobs of the Hiroshima Peace Institute about the history and development of nuclear weapons.

I don't really want to spend too much time on this, because while Hiroshima is certainly a historic site and host to one of the most tragic losses of civilian life in modern history,  I could only take so much of it. Walking from exhibit to exhibit displaying videos of dying Japanese children with radiation burns and maggots in their wounds and wax models of mothers and babies with their skin melting off of them was just emotionally draining. Everyone in the group was just shambling along with these glum looks on their faces. I guess I'm glad I had the opportunity to learn about this event right where it happened, but planning all of that for the same day within the span of just a few hours probably wasn't the best way to go about educating us.

Moving on.

Where are all the buildings? I forgot land could be green...

Late in the day we headed to our final destination: the island of Miyajima. I have to say, the Miyajima visit has to be my favorite thing I've done since coming to Japan. I'll get more into it in a future post, as we spent all of our third day there. We took a train from our Hiroshima hotel and crossed the water on a ferryboat. When we finally arrived, we were met by a place completely different from anywhere we had gone before. The island was very rural and covered in lush greenery. The island is famous for its giant red tori gate sticking out of the water, and its enormous population of adorable sika deer. These deer were everywhere, and unlike the skittish deer from back in the States, these ones would come right up to you and let you pet them. They just walked the streets alongside the visitors. There were a lot of incredible things on this island, but for whatever reason, the deer stood out to me the most.

I still can't believe the view we had from our room.

We checked into our traditional tatami-matted rooms in groups of five. It was indeed a lot of people to a room, but the rooms were actually rather spacious, so it wasn't a problem. Of course students were divvied up by gender, and there are only five guys in our program, so we were all in the same room. We dropped off our stuff and used the remaining time before dinner to walk the streets and check out the shops. They had those katana-hilted umbrellas for the equivalent of like $10. I really wanted to pick one up, but I never got around to it. Ah, well.

We headed back to the hotel after a while, changed into our (provided) yukata, and had a traditional fixed-menu Kaiseki-style Japanese dinner. There were too many dishes to count. There was some pretty weird stuff on my plates, but I made a point of trying everything. I remember there was tuna, squid, salmon, oysters, miso, rice, fruit, custard, a fish's face, lots of veggies I didn't recognize, tempura, aaand . . . other things I can't remember. I tried a fish eye, and yep, that was pretty weird.

The deer! They were everywhere!

After dinner, pretty much everyone headed over to the hotel's public baths for a relaxing way to wind down after the long day. The public nudity thing is still a bit weird as a foreigner, but I'm getting used to it. Note that these were indeed divided by gender.

Everyone eventually headed up to their rooms and stayed up way too late before finally calling it a night.

Hiroshima Trip, Day 1

Side view of the Shinkansen. It makes Speedy Gonzales
look like regular Gonzales!

Okay, so I'm just going to stop making promises about new posts at this point because I never seem to deliver on them. However! This most recent outing is most definitely worth cataloguing. I'd say it's my favorite thing I've done here so far. And to think I almost didn't make it!

The evening before the three-day trip was set to begin, I suddenly came down with a fever of a little over 100 degrees and threw up about eight times over the course of the night. Not fun. My host family had been dealing with the same bug since a day or two before, but they seemed to be getting over it pretty fast, so I figured I'd just  wear a face mask (that's what people do when they get sick here), take some medication, and go, hoping for the best.

We planned our invasion for hours before
finally deciding to enter via the front door.

Saturday was pretty rough, but we didn't actually do all that much. Most of the day was spent on the Shinkansen, which is the Japanese bullet train. The ride was about four hours, but it really didn't feel that long. The train was so comfortable; there was plenty of leg room, no seat belts, seats that leaned back surprisingly far, and you could get up and walk around whenever. It was pretty much the opposite of an airliner.

Once we arrived, we took a tram to our hotel to check into our rooms and drop off our luggage. I was in a two-person room with one of the other guys. Next, we met up with our tour guide, Ms. Yukiko Uehira (who I have to say, was the most awesome tour guide I've had in years). She looked to be in her 50s, but had dry sense of humor uncharacteristic of her age. She actually seemed to fit in with the students better than the staff, much to our delight.

Uehira-san took us on a tour of the Hiroshima Peace park, which was built in remembrance of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. People regularly bring strings of 1,000 paper cranes to the memorial of a young girl who died of leukemia following the spread of radiation from the bomb. Large plexiglass cases contain over 10 million cranes people have folded as a symbol of respect for those who died. There's actually art within the cases made by arranging the many cranes and using their colors like pixels to form pictures.

"So we'e gonna take some soba noodles, put 'em on a crepe
thing, throw some bacon on 'em, toss an egg in there, put
some veggies in for good measure,  then cover it
in sauce. Sound good?" "Um...yes."

Hirosima Castle was up next. This is an actual ancient Japanese castle. Of course it doesn't have to defend its walls much these days, but it was still incredible to enter and ascend to the top. The architecture is just so different from anything back home.

That night we went out for dinner at one of Hiroshima's okonomiyaki restaurants. As for what okonomiyaki is, I'm just going to have to rely on the picture, because I don't really know how describe it other than a cooked pile of awesome stuff. Supposedly Hiroshima has the best okonomiyaki in Japan, and I have to say, it really was delicious. I had been avoiding food for the earlier part of the day due to my stomach bug, but I decided to indulge in dinner and cross my fingers, hoping not to see that food again until it had been thoroughly digested. (Great success on that front, by the way. I was pretty much better by that night.)

We walked around town a bit after dinner on our way back to the hotel. The amount of Christmas lights in Hiroshima is absurd. Everything is covered in twinkling lights and hollow light sculptures line the streets. It was absolutely surreal; I felt like I was in a dream.

And soon I was after snuggling into bed for a good night's rest.