Thanksgiving in Hiroshima

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We travelled to Hiroshima for this Thanksgiving by Shinkansen (bullet train). The 900+ km were covered in a quick 4 hours. The weather was a little bit cold and windy but we were lucky not to have any rain, which gave us some great views of Hiroshima, Myajima and Iwakuni. Hiroshima is a modern city with a "western" grid layout, which of course is all new due to the total devastating destruction in 1945. The main attractions of the city include the Peace Memorial Park which contains several monuments and the Memorial museum. The rebuild Hiroshima castle is also a nice attraction as a couple of other small museums. After this sobering experience we had a day trip to the island of Myajima, Annika loved the roaming deers but Sophia was not very keen on dealing with them. They had some great eel and grilled oysters still on their shells as their specialty. We had a nice time walking around the main temple with it's famous tori in the water and we then took the cable car up to the top of the mountain for great views of the "inland sea". Our last day was spent in Iwakuni, which was a very pleasant surprise; since we only knew about their famous 5-arches bridge. But this bridge was in a very nice valley with a Samurai village and castle on top of the hill. We didn't get to go up to the castle since we were short of time and had to take the train back to Hiroshima to catch the Shinkansen for the trip back home. We spent about 9 hours getting back home and the kids were amazing putting up with their parents.

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