Blogs from Hiroshima, Hiroshima, Japan, Asia

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 ... read more

Hi All After visiting the Peace Park in the morning I went to the Shukkei-en Gardens which were a short walk from my hotel. These gardens feature heavily in John Hersey's article, called Hiroshima, which was published in the New Yorker magazine in August 1946. It was the first article to be printed in The US about the horror and destruction caused by the atomic bomb and it won Hersey the Pulitzer Prize. Hersey's article tells of the survivors gathering in the gardens and sheltering from the fires which were raging throughout the city. It is hard to imagine what those people went through when sitting in those beautiful and peaceful gardens today. I sat by the river and read the chapter in the article describing the suffering and bewilderment of the people on that day. ... read more

Saturday, 29th June 2019 Before heading to Hiroshima in the afternoon, I made a brief stop at the town of Tatsuno. This is home to Japan's only Soy Sauce Museum. Access to Tatsuno is relatively straight forward with frequent trains departing from Himeji throughout the day. Getting to the museum from the train station included a brief 25 minutes walk along the old town thoroughfare complete with a bridge crossing. Housed within an atmospheric brick building dating back from the previous century, the museum charged a symbolic 10 yen entry fee and it was manned by a really friendly elderly lady. I probably spent about 30 minutes in the cosy museum and there were some English translations available for non-Japanese speakers like me. The weather was unforgiving when my train pulled into JR Hiroshima Station for ... read more

On the heels of yesterday’s professionally guided sightseeing around Hiroshima, today we decided to add a self-guided tour of Hiroshima castle. The travel company had booked our train tickets for early morning to go to Okayama. However, last night we changed the Shinkansen tickets to late afternoon and took ourselves off to Hiroshima castle. Before leaving the hotel we forwarded two suitcases to Kobe and kept just the items we thought we would need for two days before we got to Kobe. We decided to use the Hiroshima Loop Bus system. There are three routes around the city. The bus station was opposite the hotel. So onto the bus we got and made our stop the castle. The castle is an impressive five storey pagoda shaped building. The castle is built on a stone base of ... read more

Woke very early this morning. We have a train to catch to Hiroshima and wanted to get away early. Alarm was set for 6:00 but we were both up before the alarm went off to finish packing bags before heading down to breakfast. We chose the Japanese breakfast this morning. It was a beautiful selection of tasty morsels of fish, rice, chicken, miso soup and some fruit to finish with. Portions were sensible and it was an excellent start to the day. Because we were up so early we were able to transfer to an earlier train once we were at the station. Again, our timing with catching trains and busses has been amazing. We arrived at the station around 7:45, swapped our tickets, and were pulling out of the station at 8:00 bound for Hiroshima. ... read more