Hiroshima

This past week was our week long fall break!  Yay!
For the first two days, my host parents took me on a trip to Hiroshima, and the nearby island Miyajima.

We took the shinkansen, or bullet train as they're known in America, which was a really cool experience.  It really feels like an airplane, except you don't have to go through the hassle of security, and the taking off and landing jolty bits.  The ride is so smooth, and there's all this space and the terminal is really nice... It was great.  I'm definitely taking shinkansen to Tokyo when I go for Christmas, I think. 

Our shinkansen was about 3 hours, and then our first stop was lunch, to try one of Hiroshima's specialties, farmer's sushi.  It's a packed down loaf, I guess you could say, of rice topped with vegetables and egg.  It was really yummy.  I still like my sushi with raw fish if possible, but the vegetables were good.  I also had cold udon as my main course, and it was served in this funky hollowed out piece of bamboo!  That's the noodles in there on ice.  The container in the middle is the sauce.  On the lid are flavorings I could add to the sauce: Green onion, sesame seeds, ginger. Then you pick up the noodles a mouthful at a time, dip them in the sauce, and eat them.  

 Our next stop was Kintai Bridge, in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture.  It's this really cool five-arched wooden bridge. (the restaurant we ate lunch at was actually right across the street)  It apparently has some historical significance, but I can't remember what.  And it was pretty!  You could look down and see straight into the water and see the fish swimming around.

That's my host dad, off ahead of us like always.

Me and my host mom

On the other side of the bridge was kind of a park and a shrine and some old buildings.
It was so warm it felt like summer.  So much so that some very unseasonable cherry trees (sakura) were blooming.  Since I won't be here in spring for cherry blossom season, it was kind-of nice to see some.

The only sakura I'll probably get to see...!

On the way to one of the shrines we crossed over a bridge and there were a bunch of koi in the water.   Of course, my host parents started throwing scraps of our snacks from the train after them.  We spent a lot of time talking about how fat the koi were.  There were also a bunch of feral cats around the park.  One of them was napping right under us, on the ledge of the bridge, looking down at the koi. 

There were also a bunch of turtles, so we kept trying to feed them instead of the fish and see if the turtles would get it but the turtles were always too slow.  In particular there was one tiny turtle that kept getting buffeted around by the fish.   It was kind-of sad, it could barely even stay in one place.

がんばって little guy! hang in there!

After that we went to see the white snakes of Iwakuni, which apparently only live there.  They had a little exhibit at the shrine because apparently the white snakes are considered to be heavenly messengers of some kind.  I think they must be albino snakes, since they were totally white with red eyes.  Apparently they breed around there.
My host mom is terrified of snakes so she waited outside, haha.

The rest of the evening was getting back to our hotel for the night.  We had dinner at the train station, Hiroshima style okonomiyaki.  Okonomiyaki is basically like a cabbage pancake, but Hiroshima's okonomiyaki also has soba noodles in it.  Honestly I didn't like it that much.  What I like about okonomiyaki is the fluffy doughy part and there was almost none of that.  It was like soba noodles on a crepe instead, basically.  And I made a mistake in ordering so I ended up with a TON of onion on mine and it was just sorta nasty.  Too bad.

After that we checked into our hotel.  I felt super spoiled.  I had a room all to myself.  And I could see the ocean out the window!

The next morning we took a ferry from our hotel out to Miyajima, an island famous for it's temple and bright orange torii gate, as well as for its deer.

Even though I knew to be expecting deer, I still didn't expect them to be everywhere! and totally tame, too.  I mean, they're wild animals, but they're so used to people they just stand there.  I guess the deal, Shaun explained to me, is that they're a kami, a Shinto spirit, so they need to be left alone to do their own thing, instead of removed from areas with people.  Correct me if I'm wrong there.

Quintessential Miyajima picture, right?

My host dad kept feeding them paper.
Here's the famous torii.  It's out in the middle of the water, but during low tide you can walk all the way out to it. 

Me and my host mom

The only extant picture of me and my host dad.  He was like "what why do you want a picture of me?"

 

We went inside the shrine, and it was interesting because there was actually a wedding going on there!

Itsukushima Shrine.  During high tide, the water goes all the way up to the bottom of the wooden structure.

A dance that was part of the wedding ceremonies

The most interesting thing about the wedding was that it was a wedding between a Japanese man and a foreign woman, with everyone wearing traditional Japanese clothing.  So the bride was in a slightly modernized version of the traditional white wedding kimono, and her mother, two sisters, and brother (I'm guessing at the identities of her wedding party) were also in kimono. 

I can't imagine that, getting married in another country and marrying into that culture like that, not even getting married in your native tradition.  That's quite the commitment for someone.

View of the torii from the temple

Apparently Miyajima is also known for its rice paddles.  This one is the world's biggest. Yeah.

Last view of Miyajima.

At Miyajima for lunch we had oysters.  Fried oysters, grilled oysters, raw oysters. THEY WERE AWESOME.

We also saw some really weird souvenirs.  Particularly these stuffed cats.  My host dad found them.
You rubbed there stomachs like you were tickling them and they rolled around laughing.

It also worked if you clapped.
The dancing ones are dancing to a Shania Twain song.  Bizarre.

When we got back to Hiroshima, our last stop on our trip was the Atomic Bomb museum and memorial. 
If you go to Hiroshima you can't very well not go to the museum and the memorial, but my host parents bought me the audio guide to go through the museum with and it was painful to take it all in.  I can't even wrap my mind around destruction and pain on the scale that we're talking about here.  I was thankful when my host mom told me I needed to hurry up because we needed to move on in order to be in time for our shinkansen home, and hurrying me through the end of the museum because trying to take it all in was starting to make me sick to my stomach.

The memorial is a very beautiful memorial, though.    I don't have any pictures unfortunately.  When my host mom was telling me why there was so much water included in the memorial I got a bit emotional.  (Most of the people as they were dying, the only thing they wanted was water, and no one could give it to them.  So the memorial is finally giving them there water.) 

(Well that means the only times my host mom has seen me cry are a) when I was running a 100 + degree fever and was freaked out by Japanese clinics, and b) at the Atomic Bomb Memorial.  Okay I can live with that.)

And of course there's the Sadako statue.

and the Atomic Dome, the burned out remains of one of the buildings that survived the brunt of the bombing.

It was kind-of a painful and emotional end to the trip, but I think it's something that everyone needs to see at some point.  I know I was upset when I saw the graph of how many nuclear weapons the US still has, even though I'm not particularly surprised.    Just something to think about.

Despite the heavy end, all in all it was a really good trip, and it was nice to spend time with my host parents.  Seriously I owe them big time.  We made some fun memories!