Out and About

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Hiroshima is a great place - very funky and modern, but with lots of green space and parks. Good city transport as well. Spent time wandering and visited Hiroshima Castle (grounds only)and Sukkein Garden. It never ceases to amaze me that there are these beautiful and quiet oases right smack dab in the middle of large and busy cities here.

We had a picnic under the cherry blossom trees in the Peace Park, too. The Peace Park is an amazing place - they have not created a mausoleum, they have created a vital and lively place full of life with kids laughing and playing everywhere you look. Quite amazing really.

Every where you go in places like Hiroshima there are lots of school kids on class trips, all anxious to practice their english as well. Hiroshima is quite modern because of course the city was rebuilt after the war. It is mind boggling to see the destruction that happened in the blink of an eye - and frightening to realize that the bombs today would leave nothing to rebuild on. Survivor guilt is huge (we spent a few hours with a survivor this morning and heard his very moving story), and all of their stories talk about how they didn't do as much as they could to help others - even though they were all just young children at the time.

Ok - so that origami that we were doing? Well there is an old tale here, that if you make 1000 paper cranes your wish will come true. Now there was a little girl who was 2 when the A bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. She survived but when she was 10 she developed leukemia, like many many of the survivors. She decided to make 1000 origami cranes for her wish to get well. She did not recover and died when she was 12 but by that time she had made many cranes, and all of her classmates had as well. The cranes decorated her funeral, and her schoolmates decided that they would launch a fund raising drive to build a memorial to the children of Hiroshima who died from the A bomb and its after effects. This drive took on a bit of a life of its own, and school children around the world got involved. The memorial was built, and a special building now houses paper cranes. Long story short, our cranes were stitched together and we hung them in the building too. Cool, no?

After spending the morning visiting the Peace Muesum on our own yesterday morning, we headed out to Myajima Island for the afternoon as a group. A good quiet afternoon after a pretty emotional morning. Myajima is a sacred island where at one time only holy men were allowed - now it is for tourists it seems😊. Sad looking deer everywhere (I think because they sell homemade deer food for the tourists, so the deer aren't getting what they need?) but nice and quiet and picturesque.

Anyway. Off to Kyoto with a stop at Himeji Castle on the way.

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Photos

Children's Memorial
Our swans included