Thanks to Mikko who's keeping up his side of the deal posting comments. Where are the rest of you? Still haven't heard from either sets of parents! Unbelievable. Please keep in touch, it's nice to hear from you all.
We really enjoyed the rest of our time in Kyoto. As you see we visited temples - several of them, one of which really had the bling factor. When we come home i think i'd like to paint our flat in gold. Not sure what our management company would have to say about that. But it does look good doesn't it? They were going to paint another temple on the other side of the city silver, but they never quite got around to it. It's a bit cheeky calling it the silver pavillion when it's blatently brown. Glad we found that out before we decided to visit. We visited some lovely japanese water gardens too.
The weather has been much less humid recently so it's made exploring much easier. We've also experienced rain equivalent to UK standards so we felt right at home when we visited Hiroshima. We stayed there for 2 nights, giving us one full day to look around. Luckily the rain didn't start until lunch time so we stayed dry for the morning at least.
I compare visiting Hiroshima to visiting Ground Zero. It's somewhere you have to go but it makes you feel so sad and horrified when you do. The museum is fabulous. It gives the history building up to the atom bombing of the city in detail, which does not prepare you in any way for the eye witness accounts, scale models showing the utter destruction of the city and artifacts on display on the next floor. It's absolutely harrowing, I couldn't bring myself to read or look at some of it. Then we went on to see the A-Bomb dome itself which I always imagined was a massive crater in the ground. The bomb exploded about 600metres above ground and almost underneath that was the building you see remarkably still standing with the metal dome roof structure (hence it's called the A-bomb dome now). This has been preserved exactly as it was left that day. The peace park and Hall of remembrance were also very sobering experiences. The hall has the names of the 140,000 people who died that year as a direct result of the bombing.
On to much more cheerful things, we discovered a Hiroshima delicacy called Okonomi-yaki. This is just yummy. It has a pancake bottom, then it's piled high with shredded cabbage and beansprouts and other veggies, then noodles, then bacon and an omlette-type egg on top, all cooked on a hot plate and expertly flipped over right there in front of you. Looks like a big omlette and tastes amazing. The best thing is they push it over to the hot plate in front of you so that it keeps warm enough for silly westerners who aren't so clever with the chopsticks to eat.
Today we travelled back to Tokyo and are staying in Shinjuku, a bussling area which should be a good place for our last few nights in Japan. Tomorrow if the weather holds up we are going to have a trip out to more rural Japan. We're going to Hakone, which is close to Mount Fuji and has some lakes, a cable car into the hills and hot springs. Looking forward to this as we've really only seen the urban side of Japan so far.
We've both said we'll be sad to leave Japan. Now that we've started to get familiar with it, we could spend a lot more time here but New Zealand awaits. We fly out on friday. Looking forward to getting our little camper van and doing some more touring.
No comments:
Post a Comment