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.