I'm back! - Vacation Recap Part 1.

12 days later I'm a little more well traveled, a little tired of riding night buses, and very satiated on good food and good times. The vacation was a big success with very few hitches overall. I'll spend the next couple posts giving a breakdown of my vacation, along with a selection of the copious number of photographs I took. (All photos eventually will be accessible via photobucket)

Day -1: Kevin arrives

As you all know my friend Kevin who is usually so on top of things slept through his original flight (which he will never hear the end of from me). What you don't know is that he managed to catch a flight out of Chicago mere hours before some huge snowstorms hit, so it's a wonder that he managed to get here on time at all. As it happened, he was arriving on Christmas Eve, my last day of scheduled work. I didn't know exactly what time he was coming in but gave him the a list of my break-times when he could call my phone, since I can't answer in class and he would be calling from a pay phone.

After spending the whole day sort of worrying about whether he even made it out of Chicago or not, whilst I was helping a staff member move some items for New Years cleaning, I finally got a call around 8:55 from Kevin telling me he's in Shinjuku station. Sweet relief. I met up with him there and was happy to see he opted to use the luggage-moving service I recommended him (just hauling your carry-on through the subways here is troublesome enough), and coincidentally I ran into a few of my co-workers and students who were going out for ramen, so we tagged along with them. Kevin got to try his first authentic Japanese ramen and learned how the coin-based ticket machines worked. He kept saying that it was so surreal being in Japan, it didn't even feel like he was there - with all the creature comforts like a plethora 7/11s and Starbucks that seem to follow one halfway around the globe.

Day 0: Bye bye Tokyo, Hello Hiroshima!

Showed Kevin around town a bit, got our bags ready and left for the bus station around 7. Me being slightly paranoid and extra cautious as I always am, I gave us ample time to find the bus station. We were standing outside for roughly an hour before people started to converge into our area with luggage and whatnot. I asked a girl in Japanese if she was going to Hiroshima, and she said "yea, we're probably taking the same bus." So all seemed well enough.

10 minutes before we were supposed to leave, wondering where the bus and where the rest of the people who were riding it could be, that same girl comes up a flight of stairs and is saying something that I don't quite understand. Something about going down, and finally I get that she's telling us to check in with the bus people downstairs in the concourse. Naturally when we got there there were nearly 100 people standing around waiting - the night-bus has gotten quite popular as of late, considering that it normally runs around half the price of the shinkansen (bullet train). We checked in, and not a moment to soon, since we only waited about another 5 minutes before we boarded. The bus was decent, comfortable enough and we could recline somewhat despite the curse of our tallness leaving something to be desired for leg-room. It was a 12 hour ride though, and I only managed to sleep for about 2 of those hours, but survived nonetheless. Kevin however could sleep through an earthquake measuring 10.5 on the Rickter scale.

Day 1: The Peace museum, the A-bomb Dome & Hiroshima castle.

It was a nice feeling after that long bus ride to be greeted cheerily by Mami at the bus station around 8:30am. Mami was the T.A. (Teacher's Assistant) for my Japanese class in my last semester of college, and I told her I planned to visit her if and when I moved to Japan. There's one promise kept. Her energy seemed contagious, and after dropping off our bags at the ryokan (Japanese-style inn) we were staying at we made way.

En Preparacion.

Hiroshima is, to me, a beautiful little city. It's so small-time compared to Tokyo that if it wasn't for the unfortunate events of 1945, it would scantly be on the radar, paling in comparison to the other monstrous metropolises I've seen thus far. The visible mountains in the distance and the sheer openness of everything was like a breath of fresh air to me. The rivers and bridges integrated with the city were also quite beautiful. Still more unlike Tokyo, Hiroshima has a tram-line that goes through some major parts of the city for easy access. Our first stop was the Atomic Bomb dome, a dilapidated building which was directly beneath the a-bomb and was therefore spared from complete destruction.

Atomic Bomb Dome.

A city view.

The Peace Park begins with the A-Bomb dome and leads to the much visited museum, so we went there next. It was big and quite beautiful despite our sleep deprivation. Mami said that she had been to the museum several times when she was younger on school trips, but was most often chatting away with her friends or not really paying attention, so this would be her chance to really learn something. After a failed attempt at a tour from a volunteer guide who seemed to be looking more for free English practice than anything else, and subsequently ditched her as fast as possible without being blatantly rude and took a subsequent sidequest to experience Hiroshima's other claim to fame: Okonomiyaki (literally: "Cooked as you like it")

Okonomiyaki

Sidequest complete and bellies full, we returned to the peace museum. As it turns out they systematically structured the museum to get gradually more and more depressing as you go through the thing. It starts off innocently enough, with a rather truncated history of events before, during and after the war. Then things get gradually heavier until you're seeing pictures of melted bodies and actual tongues and other actual bodily components kept intact to display the havoc that radioactivity reeked upon them. The most moving thing to me was the stories of individuals, broken lives and people scrawling names on bricks in vain efforts to find information on family members. I'm glad I made it through there but have no plans on going again any time too soon. There were also other cool bits to the museum like a letter from Einstein, and information such as leaflets dropped by the U.S. Government and destroyed by the Japanese during the war.

After all that we needed something lighthearted to take our minds off the monument to tragedy we just witnessed, so we went to Hiroshima castle! The place was beautiful and offered numerous photo opportunities.

Hiroshima Castle.

The moat!

Our ever-vigilant female Samurai guide, Mami-san.

After all this we were pretty beat, but still we pressed on since Mami was leaving for Grandmother's the next day and wouldn't be around to hang out with us anymore. We had some delicious Kaiten Zushi (Rotating Sushi) - you know the kind of place where they have fresh-made plates you can choose from rotating on a conveyer belt - and finally did a bit of Karaoke. I passed out some time around 8, knowing that going to Miyajima island the next day would be equally as exciting, even without Mami: less atomic stuff, more wild deer!

To Be Continued...

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For more pictues, see my future site for hosting pictures (since blogspot has a cap), Photobucket.