Hiroshima (3 weeks late)

My apologies for the late update... things have been tough for me lately. As with before, I offer no excuses, only a new update.

This isn't going to be quite the post that I might have hoped it would be, but, like I said, life has been kind of rough for me lately and it was just too hard to try to put this trip into words while I was figuring other stuff out in the moment. So, this is mostly just a little recap of how the whole thing went down.

Three weeks ago I went down to Hiroshima with my host mom, as well as Yoshiko, Asako and Isam, a young man from Syria that stayed with the Endou family for about a month last December. We got up REALLY early on Monday (September 21) to catch our plane. Once we got there, we hopped on a train toward the Hiroshima Peace Park to meet up with a friend of Asako's, as well as my host mom's son and his wife. We had a quick coffee break (getting up at 5 AM will make that kind of a necessity...) then went over to the ACTUAL Peace Park. We spent some time walking around, checking out the various memorials, spending a bit of extra time at the Genbaku (A-bomb) Dome and the Children's Memorial.

After that, we went on into the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. This is the piece that was the hardest to think about getting down onto (e-)paper. For me, it was clear from the start that the museum was something that had to be done differently for each individual. That being said, I was also pretty sure that not everyone would see it that way. Because of this, I don't really feel comfortable talking about the way that I dealt with what was being shown to me (yes, this from the girl that proclaimed her search for religion to the world a dozen entries ago) because I imagine that a lot of people would see my choice as 'wrong' or, at least, not in line with the intent of the museum, even though I know that it was the best (possibly the only) way for me to experience it. Thus, I'm going to leave off with the remark that it was a very powerful and very important experience that I feel so fortunate to have been able to experience.

After that we headed over to a little okonomiyaki place. For those of you that don't know, okonomiyaki is sometimes described as the Japanese version of pancakes and sometimes as Japanese pizza. Don't ask me how that works... but at any rate, it looks like this:

It was AWESOME!! After that, we mostly just hung out for a while before Okaa-san, Asako, Isam, Yoshiko and I headed out to Miyajima, a nearby island that's a nature preserve, for the night. There was a little bit of transportation fail, but we got to our cabin and, after a nice little dip in the ofuro, headed to bed.

When we got up in the morning, Asako and Isam talked me into heading out to the beach nearby and taking a little dip in the ocean.

After that, we headed up to Mt. Misen and took the ropeway up to the top of the mountain and wandered around to the various temples up there.

Once we'd headed back down, we headed over to a little restaurant nearby for lunch (RAMEN) and then went for a little walk along the beach past the floating gates.

Which, unfortunately, were not floating at the time (i.e. the tide was out). :(

Anyway, then it was a boat/train ride back to Hiroshima station and a shinkansen (bullet train) ride back home, and that was it!!

YAY!

Wow, it feels really good to finally have this up here. I'll think about putting up a brief (REALLY BRIEF) recap of the last three weeks on Monday, but don't expect anything... I'm considering taking a break from the blog for the next few weeks here.

Pictures can be found here and here (I finally figured out that I can do the crazy-awesome hyperlink thing... YAY!).

Take care, all!

~ Anna