March 15

The last few days have been really hectic, so I’ll start from the beginning of the Hiroshim trip and then come back to Thursday if I get the chance.

Saturday evening, okaasan drove me to Akaike at 9:30. I got to Nagoya with time to spare, but then I realized I didn’t have Christian’s phone number (I had left it on the Mac’s dash and never transferred it to my phone). I figured I would just see him at the terminal before we left, but by a slight of chance, we met up in the eki slightly after I had arrived. We got on the bus and shortly thereafter, had a painful night of sleeping on the bus. I kept waking up to different body parts hurting as a result of the weird angles the seats left me in. Somewhere around seven, I woke up to a dimmed cabin, and shortly thereafter, we were getting off the bus in Hiroshima. It was cold, bright, and early. I realized quickly that I had made a gross oversight; I had not researched the directions from the eki to the hostel. As a result, Christian and I searched a bit for a free internet signal for the PSP to pick up. We were not very successful, so we began walking when we came upon the atomic bomb dome unexpectedly. We decided to look around the memorial park (and the dome) to pass the time (until the guest services opened and we could research our lodgings). By luck again, our hosel was lised in my guidebook and we were able (after travelling the wrong streets for a while) to find the hostel. We were only allowd to semi-check in, but we dropped our bags and went out again in search of intersting things to do. We set out to see the castle, but on the way, got significantly side-tracked by the shopping district.

We did finally get to the castle (known as the koi castle, though we only saw one murky figure that might have been a koi). We almost didn’t go inside the castle because I thought it would be no more interesting than Nagoya castle, but we found our student status gave us free entry, so we went in. It wasn’t that interesting (and the view from the top wasn’t as good as Nagoya’s), but it was entertaining.

Afterward, we got really lost. We were trying to go back toward our hostel, but ket getting distracted by things like a small garden in the middle of the city and the grassy bank of the (wrong) river. We did end up seeing a lot of Hiroshima (which s especially pretty in the morning and early day).

Once we had fully checked in (and traversed the city by getting lost on the way back to the hostel), we set out for the famous Hiroshima okonomiyaki (recommended by my host mother). The Hiroshima way is to start with a crepe, pile on cabbage and bean sprouts, add the bacon (and soba/udon) and flip it all over onto an egg before adding the sauce. It was pretty good, but I still like okaasan’s (and Ayami’s) better.

After dinner, we returned to the hostel where we planned our transportation to Mazda and played some more PSP. Before the trip, Christian bought Patapon (upon my mere mention) and I’ve been unable to get past the second battle since.

When we went to the front desk to get information on visiting Miyajima and we ended up talking to the night watch, who was very nice and spoke slow Japanese to us. She had studied English in San Francisco and was eager to talk to us about our experiences in Japan.