Hiroshima

Last weekend I went to Hiroshima. The trip had two halves. The first half might be called the awful half, and the second the fun half.

The awful half started on the way there - I had decided to save some money and go to Hiroshima via night bus, which is what it sounds like. I left my host family's house at 9PM, boarded at 11:50 after wandering around looking for the terminal, and arrived at 6AM, having slept very little. I then spent six hours wandering around the city - I had bought a two-day pass that gave me unlimited cable car rides. I rode to the port, where I dropped my cellphone, wandered to a Book-Off (a big used book store chain) and bought two volumes of Doraemon just for fun before realizing I had dropped my cellphone, then backtracked to the port-ish area where it was happily located. I went to a starbucks I had seen from a cable car, and bought a drink hoping I'd be able to use the internet, but alas! no internet. Somehow six delirious hours had passed, and it was time for me to go to the A-Bomb museum.

I had gone to Hiroshima because one of the classes at Gansai Kaidai was having a field trip, and everyone was invited even if you weren't in he class, and there was to be a speech my an a-bomb survivor. You were supposed to see the museum before the speech, so I took the streetcar to the a-bomb dome and walked around the dome, the building that was left standing even though it was right near the epicenter of the blast (the blast came from directly above so the walls up, people think). I was circling it and thinking some rather depressing thoughts about war, when two Japanese men walked up and said they wanted to practice their English, and it turned out they were Jehova's witnesses, so that was weird and awkward. Then I walked through the museum. If you've ever been to the holocaust museum, it's a little like that. Hard to describe, certainly. Lots of very, very saddening stuff. Then, we heard a speech from a bomb survivor, which was also... hard. It seemed so... well, surreal I guess, something like that - hard to believe that things like that really happened. Descriptions and photos of Hiroshima after the bomb fell are like descriptions of... hell, or something. Too awful to describe.

That was the bad part. Weirdly, the day made a complete turnaround, and my afternoon after the horror of the a-bomb museum and speech was really enjoyable. I went to Miyajima, which is about an hour streetcar ride plus a fifteen minute ferry ride away from downtown Hiroshima. Which is, it should be mentioned, a really pretty city. Lots of canals, very clean-seeming, and the streetcars are really fun. You get to see the city as you ride, unlike, say, a subway.

Anyway, Miyajima is an island, a rather small one with some very fun landmarks. One of the iconic images of Japan is the big red Torii gate out in the water. Perhaps you've seen it. Anyway, that's Miyajima. It was low tide when I went, so I didn't get to see the picture-postcard kind of scene, but I could walk out to the gate and see it up close, out on the tide flats. So that was cool. It's really large. I hadn't realized how large it was. It's quite old so there were some splits in the wood, and people stick coins in there, and I am certainly not a believer in Shinto but I thought I should be polite to the gods and stick a coin in there anyway, and I thought it would be nice if I could find a coin from the year I was born, and the first coin I pulled out was indeed a coin from the year I was born, and I was tall enough to reach a place where I'm pretty sure it'll stay. I don't know, maybe people clean it out every once in a while. Maybe. But it's probably still there.

There's more to Miyajima than the gate, though! There's lots of old temples, especially near the top of the highest mountain on the island, and there was a gondola to the top, which my two-day metro pass covered, interestingly, so I took that to the top and walked down. Thanks to China's ridiculous pollution, which has been blowing in recently and been on the news, I couldn't see very far, at all, which is a shame because the view is supposed to be lovely. It was nice anyway, though. I wandered around for a while near the top, which was quite fun! It was kind of zelda-esque, which is a very good thing. I need to find more things to do that are zelda-esque. It was getting dark and I was incredibly tired so I went to my hostel.

The next day I went home, by train, regular train, commuter-kind-of-train, which took... all day. We caught a train at ten in the morning and I got home about... 8, I think. Anyway. We took some stops - I was doing this part with some friends - including one to Okayama, which is Momotaro's hometown. Momotaro... is a folk story, so that's a little like saying it was the gingerbread man's hometown. Riding in the train for hours and hours without sitting down was kind of hard. Anyway, that was my weekend. More or less. A post about the weekend after this one - where I went to a "Maid Parade," among other things - coming soon. Sorry for the lack of updates recently.

Sorry for no pictures; Blogger is being angry. I'll put them in the post tomorrow.

Tales from the Past: Nara

Today's tale is a tale from long ago. More than a month, anyway. My speaking partner invited me to go to Nara, which was the capitol of Japan from 710 to 784. It's a smaller city, but one with a good deal of history (and a good many UNESCO sites). We bought a one-day kind of card, which worked on all the trains and buses. It's still floating around my room somewhere. The train took about an hour. We ate at an Italian chain once we got there. It's been a while, so I'm a little sketchy on some of the details. Here are some pictures! No captions because I'm uploading them straight from the web. You see, the reason I never wrote this post is because I had forgotten my camera, and didn't have any pictures to put up with it. But recently my speaking partner sent me the ones she took.

Here's me feeding some deer! They're kind of scruffy looking but I think it's just the time of year. They run wild in Nara park, which is near Todaiji, the big temple we were visiting. They know exactly how many there are - I've forgotten the number but it's very specific. Anyway, you can feed them little wafers you can buy from vendors. Once you have them, they know you have them, and they swarm you. They nibbled some of my clothes and ripped my friend's (the floridian, for those who have been reading) jacket. It's a little scary, but also very fun. They just take it right from your hand. Sometimes they jump up and hoof you, though. I'm wearing my headphones in the picture, and one of them snagged them with its hoof, and I had to untangle it. When you don't have any food they're unintersted in you, and you can just go up and pet them. They're not really into it, though, as you can tell in the second picture.

Here's me looking dorky outside Todaiji. Seriously dorky. But Todaiji was cool. It's the world's largest wooden building, and it used to be bigger. It also houses an alarmingly large Buddha. There's a pillar in the back of the temple with a hole in it, large enough to fit through if you're relatively thin (I didn't try, they were kids in it at the time) and if you can fit supposedly you will find enlightenment in the next life. But, this hole, which is large enough to fit through, is the size of one of the nostrils on the Buddha in Todaiji. So: a large Buddha. Pictures of the nostril pillar, and the Buddha, at the Wikipedia.

We also went to another temple, notable for having the world's oldest standing wooden building. Also, it was incredibly cold, and the floridian took us on a quest to find ninja shoes he could purchase, which have the big toe in a separate little shoe of its own. I want to go to Nara again when it gets a little warmer.

Koko

I had a good day today. I had forgotten there was a quiz this morning and arrived having done zero studying. (Two sentences which do not usually belong together, right there) but after 120 seconds of glancing over the vocab list (and, well, having studied a lot of it before) I'm pretty sure I got 8 or 9 out of ten. Then, this afternoon, I walked to Hirakata (the nearest city, where I always set out from on my various adventures) and picked up my foreign resident registration card - which they have to me without uttering a word of complaint about the fact that yesterday was the last day I was supposed to be able to pick it up. Then, I went to the local starbucks (so exactly the same all over the world) and got a hot coffee and access to pure, unfiltered grade A internet. I'm currently violating copyright at more than 300kb/second. Which is far from a record, but feels so, so good. Each byte is a drop of water on my dry, withered hard drive. No real water on my hard drive, though, please.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the family dog, Koko, who is a Chihuahua. He (she? actually I don't know) is half the size of a cat and convulses and shivers constantly. If you put him between your hands... he shakes. Constantly. It kind of seems like there's something seriously wrong with him... especially when he compulsively licks my clothes, putting wet patches on them. He seems to like me a lot, but maybe that's just because I don't torment him like my four and six year old host siblings do. He crawls up onto me and lays on my chest whenever I lie down. Pretty cute, but... not really all there. I've been missing my home dogs, which are... large dogs. Very large. And, though I suppose who really knows, and anyway we're talking about dogs, I feel like are much smarter. Captions from the Band's "We Can Talk," form Music from Big Pink.