Hiroshima

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Hiroshima was hard. We arrived in the afternoon did a luggage drop and decided to get lunch before the Peace Park. Some old dude tried to mack on Susan the entire train ride to our hostel. Fun fact about Hiroshima is that, like San Francisco, they buy their streetcars from all over the world so it's kind of a cool hodgepodge of cars on the streets. We, as has been the theme, were bad about getting breakfast so were hangry searching for food and wound up at an Italian place near the Peace Park that wasn't too bad. I was feeling anxious about actually going to the memorial sites and the museum and it started showing up in my body around the end of lunch when I started expelling all manner of bad energy through my nose. We walked completely around the A-Dome and the entirety of the park and the museum. After the second story of a child's death, I couldn't read anymore of the accounts and text. It was really just too much for me and by the time I got through the exhibit I had a massive headache and my nose was basically a stream. My day just kept getting worse and worse healthwise.

After doing the Peace Park area, we headed back to fully check-in and then set out on a search for Hiroshima style okonomiyaki. We briefly stopped for some Japanese style craft beers, that I thought were pretty not great. Then we made our way over to this like three-story mall of okonomiyaki. It was super hard to decide which place to go to so we just blind picked a floor on the elevator and got out and walked around. That floor was sad as hell. There were a few people around, but it was deserted and everyone just looked tired of life; it was like peeking into the back of house at the end of a double shift. I don't remember which floor that was, but it was not the one we ate on. We ended up at Teppei which turned out to be great. Seats were full, grill was sizzling and the women making the okonomiyaki were super nice. Your seat is right up at the grill so you see it all getting made and it's like literally served hot on the grill. We also tried the butter grilled oysters as the ones in the area are specific to that area. They were unusual in that they were quite meaty, but not very juicy and didn't have a specific flavour, like I wouldn't be able to recognize them by the taste of the body of water they came from. These are pretty huge so we split them between us and it was a good amount of food. Afterward, we walked around the mall area looking for sweets which has been kind of a challenge for us so far. I like my sweets to be sweeter than they seem to be here and we've been trying so many different things because they all look so pretty and delicious. All that to say that I paid like $3 for a crappy donut. Susan had found another oyster place so we decided to make our way over there instead of heading back to the hostel. It turned out to be a great decision; it was pretty laid black cool vibe and I got some fried oysters! I preferred them a lot better fried, but I always prefer my oysters fried so that's not really saying anything. As we headed back to the hostel the winds from the outer bands of Hagibis started blowing through the city.

By the next day, as Hagibis was making landfull near Tokyo, it was full on crazy winds blowing over bikes, flapping the heck out of flags and making folks look like they were in 80s music videos hair waving in the wind. We made our way to Shukkeien Garden (pro tip, google maps directs you to an entrance at the back that is closed so make sure you go to the front entrance or you'll be walking an extra 10 mins). I was still feeling sick and by this point was also having stomach problems so I saw maybe 5 mins of the garden before posting up in the cafe area with easy access to the bathrooms. It was a quick lunch at Ichiran, which is still in my top three favourite ramen, then off to a lantern festival down the coast closer to Hagibis.

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