About Me

maker, creative, living lightly, local, craft, minimalism, and taking joy in the small things

Sunday, 14 October 2007

Some time in Hiroshima, to drink sake


I stayed at Mitch's place on Friday night, with Phoebe and Lucy and we left there by 9am and we were at the A-bomb dome by 10.30am. It was amazing to think that the bomb exploded only 600m above it, and so much of it was left standing. The Peace Park is beautiful – very lush and well cared for. We wandered down to the paper crane exhibit – for Sadako the Japanese girl who tried to make 1000 paper cranes to cure her leukemia.

At some stage some weird guy hooked onto us, and even though we tried to ditch him politely he couldn’t take a hint, so we lost him in the hyakuen shop! Enjoyed some shopping along the arcade – bought a cardigan in the mens section, which is becoming too common! We ate Mos burger, stole a coaster, and dashed to the station to meet the other ‘Guch JETs.

Got out to the Sake Festival after a long train ride to Seijo. Y1500 for a little china sake cup, and all you can drink. We started off intending to work our way down Japan – from Hokkaido. But the queues at Hokkaido were hideous, so we gave up on that plan! Rather, we just joined the shortest queue, and then went to the Kyushu tent because we had been told it was good.

Mitch and I met a weird girl, who wanted our opinions on whether she and her fiancé should circumcise their as yet unconceived son. Strange. And she was still sober, not sure if that makes it better or worse.

As the day turned to night, and the Japanese became drunk, thus more confident in their English ability, we started getting approached by randoms. We made friends with some, took photos with others, and ignored the complete crazies!

By this stage we were stationed by the Yamaguchi end of the Chugoku tent and drank all their good sake. By around 7.30pm we had cleaned them out of all their good stuff, so we headed to the train station to find our hotels.

I ended up sharing a room with Dom, which worked out well. Basically we checked in and then rushed out to dinner, given it was close to 9pm by now, and everyone was starving!

We ate ‘American Food’ at The Shack. Never again. I’m not into it enough, the burger was nowhere near Grill’d quality! But it was a fun place, and we just all sobered up a bit with the food.


This morning (Sunday) we woke up, and ate the sumptuous hotel breakfast (really it was good, and had a huge selection) before checking out and going to eat at Subway. It's so typical, over here, living in our small cities and towns where foreigners and 'foreignness' is minor, we get pretty excited seeing stuff from home. And I don't even eat Subway back in Australia!


Anyway, made it home alive, with all my belongings, after a great weekend.


I will definitely go back to Hiroshima for some more sightseeing next time! There are 2 albums on Facebook - 1 of the Sake Festival and the other is from the little bit of sightseeing in Hiroshima we did.

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