Faster than a speeding bullet
Trip Start
Jun 12, 2006
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147
173
Trip End
Jul 01, 2007
Hiroshima, Japan
Friday, April 27, 2007
First impressions is that things are expensive...if you did a little deeper its not too bad. One mistake though is not purchasing a rail card, which can only be done outside Japan as used while inside, this gives massive discount on transport. Although you can get last minute tickets for the bullet trains at discount price as well. Food is very cheap in supermarkets...box of sushi for one pound and cans of beer for around 50p. Eating out can be expensive especially for drinks, a Pepsi can be the same price as shrimp tempura!!! So getting use to being more frugal with my cash after 3 months of doing what I want in SE Asia.
An over night bus ride to Hiroshima from Tokyo and return of the eye infection...plus scabby chest from a little bit of sun burn in Cambodia.
As soon as I arrived I got a ticket for the bullet and then had 6 hours in Hiroshima.
So everyone knows why this place is famous and the center piece of the memorial is the A-Bomb dome, where Elora Gay exploded above in 1945. The whole area is done really well. Across the river, where buildings once stood is the memorial park. This holds the cenograph, a center piece of remembrance services, which looks down across the Flame of Peace (only extinguished when the last nuclear weapon is destroyed) and further down to the A-Bomb dome. The park also has memorials to the Korean victims of the war, a mound of ashes and a clock which strikes at 8.15am each morning when the bomb exploded.
The museums are superb. A museum with stories told by the victims and a museum starting with the history of the city before the war, when the bomb hit and the reconstruction. It also educates on the different nuclear weapons, who holds them, the power and effects on humans, such as the radiation sicknesses. It does has some graphic pictures...but the city should be proud of how it has recorded these events in history.
On the way back to the station I stopped at the reconstructed Hiroshima castle for my first views of Japanese buildings. Then onto my first experience of a bullet train......2 hours later from Hiroshima back to Kyoto in the Kansai region.
In Kyoto I met up with my two favorite WAGS Charlotte and Aimee, who I first met drunk in Wellington, New Zealand and later in OZ....for local drinks and Japanese boggy.
I am starting to love this country......another cultural experience!!!!
