In Japan, around the middle of August, is a national holiday of sorts called "Obon" when people go home to pay their respects to deceased relatives. Not everyone gets off, but we got 4 special days of summer leave for it. Since we are so cunning, we chose Wed-Fri and Monday, giving us a 6 day weekend of awesome.
Wednesday we took a 2.5 hour train to Hiroshima. We later found out we could have taken the Shinkansen (the bullet train) for maybe 1000 yen more and only used up a half hour... which we will do next time. 2.5 hours is a long time to kill. We started off by finding a place called "Okonomi-mura" which essentially means "Okonomiyaki Village" - it's a building that literally has 3 or 4 floors of okonomiyaki restaurants. Everyone sits around a giant hot plate and the okonomiyaki is made in front of you. Okonomiyaki is essentially a savory Japanese pancake. I don't have any pictures, but I know you have Google.
After a delicious lunch, we took a cab over to the site of the atomic bombing. Pictured here is the "A-dome" which is one of very few structures to survive the atomic bombing. It's also nearly directly under the site of the explosion which makes it even more incredible that it's still standing. I felt kind of weird taking pictures of it, so we moved on to the Peace Memorial Park and Museum. This sounds trite and obvious, but they were incredibly depressing though I'm glad I went.
We had a few more hours to get through before our epic Tokyo vacation began, so we killed some time in Kinokuniya, a giant bookstore which has English! Language! Books! I picked up a few books for the Japanese Language Proficiency Exam which is quite unfortunately on my 22nd birthday.
Anyway, we had a bus to catch at 8 PM that we would be spending the next 13.5 hours on, covering nearly half of the entire main island of Japan. Little did we know the trouble we would find....
To be continued! (Okay I'm going to write the continuation right now but I figured I should segment my posts somehow...)
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