Ok so I got back from an incredibly awesome field trip last night and I was really tired. I took a lot of pictures on this trip; 1,844! That puts my total pictures taken to over 8,000! I have a goal of taking 10,000 pictures before coming home and now that seems very do-able.
So the meeting time was 9 am at the shin kobe station. I wasn't 100% sure how to get there so I left a little early. I ran into Darlo and Martin at Sannomiya station and followed them down to the subway line. It was 200 yen to go a pretty short distance so Darlo and Martin just decided to walk. When I got there I found Jay but no one else was there. We were all worrying about Pac not coming on time so we told him he should be here at 7, but he wasn't and didn't show up until right before we left.
Once we were all gathered up we headed up to the shinkansen boarding platform. This was the first time I had ever ridden on the shinkansen soI was really looking forward to it. The train is incredibly aerodynamic and really long. Very cool looking. Inside was very comfortable and nice. I sat with Jay, Nohea, and Les and we started up playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on our DS, that came to be THE game we played on the trip.
Before we knew it we arrived at Hiroshima station and then boarded a tour bus. Hiroshima is more like Kyoto in the sense that the area is more spread out and not as busy as Osaka. We only rode for a little bit before we got to Okonomi-mura(village). It was a building that just sold okonomiyaki. This Okonomiyaki was very different from the stuff you get in Kansai. It had noodles in it but they were too crunchy for me. I thought it was a very good meal but everyone else was acting like it was the best thing in the world. If given a choice I would eat the kansai version instead. After eating we ended up spending some time at this little park nearby. It had the playing card symbols cut out of walls so it looked pretty cool, plenty of picture ops.
So after another short bus ride we got to the peace museum and met up with some Japanese students from a nearby college. They were really nice but like most Japanese people I met they weren't really talkative in either language. The park was really pretty. The sakura (cherry blossom) flowers were blooming so it was the perfect time to go. As you probably know there is a folk legend that if you fold 1000 paper cranes you get a wish, well as you can see in my pictures paper cranes are all over the park. There are monuments just covered with them. One of the major sights in the park is the building that was directly beneath the bomb's blast. The bomb actually didn't detonate when it struck the ground but rather in the air. In what I can only assume is an eye of the storm kind of thing this building wasn't completely vaporised like everything else was. This building is part of a set actually. If you stand from the museum there is a large stone arch with a record of the victims buried underneath (I think), then a pond and a torch so if you look through the arch you see the flame and the building.
One part of the museum has a room where when you enter it gives you a panoramic view of the destroyed Hiroshima. In another room is a computer screen that plays a loop of pictures of all of the people who died from the explosion. You can also look up on the computer the age they were when they died and what their profession was. Its staggering to see real faces of war victims. A debate topic our classes here like to use is “was it justified for the US to drop the bomb” and one argument is that more people died in this event or in that event. Like its only 200,000 people. But when you can see that those 200,000 people were real people, its enough to make anyone cry I think. They also had a section where eye witnesses talked about trying to help those who weren't killed right away. Apparently if you give a severally burned victim water, they will die from the shock. So there were so many stories of people having to say no to crowds of people's dieing wish and not being able to help them. Also people who gave them water but felt guilty for it. It was all really tough to hear.
The main part of the museum starts out with an explanation of the pacific war since the Meji restoration. I was surprised actually because it mentioned the rape of nanking. This is a source of conflict in Japanese/Chinese relations even today because the amount of people who were brutally killed by Japanese troops varies from a few thousand to a few hundred thousands. The museum said “the currently accepted number in China is 300,000”. They also showed documents from the US side talking about the construction of the bomb and why Hiroshima was chosen. Then there was two model cities, one before the bomb and one after. There was also a cement wall that was riddled with holes from tiny shards of glass. There were lots of little personal items that were destroyed in horrific ways and information about who owned them. We actually started to run out of time so we hurried through the end faster then we wanted.
We then walked to our hotel, dropped some stuff off, took a breather then headed into one of the rooms for a discussion about the atomic bomb with the Japanese students. When it came to our groups turn to talk I said that Its hard to say if we should have or shouldn't have done something because there are a million different ways the world could have turned out if a different decision was made. Since we can't know what those realties are we can't say if it was the wrong choice or not.
So after all of that we were ready to get some food. I went down to the lobby and waited for people to come down but some people were taking to long and no one could decided anything so we ended up waiting forever. Once we finally went out we were too big of a group so me, christy, emily, tom and two Japanese students secretly dropped off of the group and went to this little ramen shop. I had never had ramen like this. You get a plate full of the cooked noodles, vegetables, and meat then you dip it in this spicy sauce/soup and eat. It was really good. You could select how spicy you wanted it. It went up to 30 so tom got 20 erin got 15 me and emily got 9 and christy got 6. Tom was sweating bullets but was loving it. Erin was doing good, mine was just right but emily was having the hardest time in the world eating it. It wasn't that spicy but she was acting like she was going to die. After dinner we got some conbini snacks and went back to the hotel. Those four started watching fight club in their room but I went out for a bit to play with my new camera taking night shots. I got some good results I think. I have a tripod and an option for slow shutter speed so I was able to do that thing where the street is in focus but all you see is the head lights from the cars streaming by. You really have to take a lot of pictures that way because they more often then not don't come out right. After that I watched the end of the movie then went to bed.
So the next day, woke up had a buffet dinner checked out then we got on the bus towards Miyajima. We thought we had an hour so we started to play final fantasy again and tried to do a dungeon. For some reason you can't save in the middle of a dungeon in this game so unless we beat a boss we would loose everything. Well the bus stopped and we were far from the boss so we had to turn it off. We took a ferry across and the view was gorgeous. Miyajima is famous for its torii gate that stands out in the middle of the water, I took as many pictures of that as I could. We arrived on the island and met up with the Japanese students again. This island also has a lot of dear walking around like Nara but they aren't as annoying. So we got the groups and walked to this big temple that was built on stilts on the beach. When the tide is out its a very cool sight to be walking on a temple over water. From here I just walked around taking pictures of the scenery with the sakura flowers with Matt and a japanese student I think here name was Rena. We had a pretty good katsu don for lunch then headed back to the ship. Some of the guys had their pants half wet and apparently tried to go out to that torii. Once we got to the boat we said good bye to the Japanese students then rode back to the bus.
So again we rode the bus for a while until we got to kintaikyou. This is kind of a park like place. It starts out with a very large bridge that has a 3 or 4 large arcs in it so when you are crossing you go up and down. It goes over this shallow river and it was a really nice sight. Once on the other side we made our way through the are to the cable cart because on top of the mountain was a small castle. Once you get off the cable car there is a nice path that goes through the forest for about 5 minutes until you get to the castle. The view from the top of the mountain was gorgeous and of course there were plenty of sakura trees there. Inside the castle was a little museum that had a lot of swords. They had one sword that was huge. Like most samurai swords are shorter then you would expect them to be based off of anime and games but this sword was like something Ichigo from bleach might use. Very cool. I got to the top, took more pictures made my way back down and then just wandered the area for a bit. There were a few temples and this really neat fountain so I took a lot of pictures of that. I had some sakura flavored ice cream and it was really good. I don't know how to describe the flavor but it was really unique. Eventually time was up and we went back to the bus. There isn't too much to say about this place but there were tons of really nice photos.
From there we went towards the hotel. It was in a really tiny little city so there wasn't really going on but its nice to see those spots in Japan as well. The hotel room it self was ok, the last hotel I shared a room with Pac in this room I had to my own. One interesting thing about the hotel was on the remote there were two channel changing buttons one that said muryou (free) and one that said yuuryou (cost money). As you may have guessed the yuuryou was porn. But it was in a way that everyone accidentally pressed it. I quickly dropped my stuff off in my room and waited to catch someone and go out to dinner because I was hungry. I went out with a group of me, matt, emily, christy, erin and zoe. We had a hard time orienting ourselves with the map at first so we got a little lost. Emily and zoe gave up on us at one point and just went to a yakitori place. I wasn't paying any attention to the directions debate at all and just let matt and erin take control on that issue. We did end up finding the yakiniku place and it was worth the trouble. I have had yakiniku before with host family and the kobe beef I ate was given to use in a yakiniku style but this was the first time I had gone to a yakiniku restaurant. If you come to japan above almost anything else I recommend going to a yakiniku restaurant. Its kind of pricy and you need to go there with the idea to enjoy flavor rather then getting full but really worth it. You have a grill on your table and they give you the meat uncooked. You only get a few small pieces but the flavor is out of this world. The store owner seemed like he doesn't see giajin very often so he kept checking up on us making sure we were doing everything alright. After we ate Christy stood up and hit her head on the vent above the table and it made a very loud gong sound. All of us were just laughing at her but another customer came by and gave her a warm cloth. It made it look like gaijin don't care about their own. After the food we went back, got emily and then bought some snacks. I was going to go watch a movie in cole's room (just kind of inviting myself over) but then I ran into martin on his way to vals room because he got invited to watch anime. So I invited myself over their instead. On cable there are actually two anime channels, I was amazed. We saw cowboy bebop. We ended up playing a drinking came, I was drinking ginger ale, where you all count in a circle to 21 but the numbers you say are replaced with something else. So it starts out with 1 2 3 4 5 6 14 8 9 10 11 12 13 7 15 16...21 and who ever has 21 end on them gets to replace something else so it became 1 2 3 4 lela has 6 14 8.... and when you mess up you drink. It ended up getting pretty funny at the end. I ended up gong to bed at midnight.
The next day I had a japanese style breakfast which means that only half of the stuff was edible. We all packed up then checked out. Once again we boarded the bus and drove for another hour or so. We ended up at a place called ruikouji. This was a temple area with a 5 story pagoda an average size temple and a bunch of sakura trees. Not much to say here but the pictures are really nice. There is one place that if you clap or stomp infront of the stone steps it echoes in a weird squeaky sound. Its really cool. We then ate a japanese lunch somewhere and it wasn't very good and they only gave you a tiny bit of tea to drink, no water. So it was really tough to eat that stuff. We got a little time to walk around the place then boarded the bus again.
Our final destination was Akiyoshido. After a good amount of time on the bus we arrived at the cave entrance. It starts out with a man made tunnel with just a little bit of a downward slop and then you enter into the cave. It had a path so its not like we went cave diving or anything but it is always cool to see all of that stuff. I took pictures and they came out pretty cool, but not very accurate. In the pictures there is a lot of green lights but in reality there wasn't. I don't know why cameras do that but its cool none the less. As you exit the cave you get this really nice path through a bit of forest with a really nice stream running underneath. Just a tiny bit from that was the town with some houses and some tourist shops. We had some time there to look at everything and one guy was selling fake grasshoppers made out of grass. He started talking to us in really good English and I wanted to buy one from him but even with a little plastic box it would be impractical to store and display. We all met up at station for the bus, Pac was late of course and we went off again.
Not too longer after that we arrived at yamaguchi station. I don't know if that is the name of the city as well but we had about 30 mins before our train arrived. I wanted to find a conbini and take as many pictures as possible of this little area because I most likely will never come to this town again. The real reason we stopped here was because there was an old fashioned train that took us to the shinkansen station. It was really cool to see something like that moving and the inside totally felt like old timey turn of the century kind of image. Its apparently a special deal for this train to run because it only goes during some promotion or just weekends or something because as we went by there were lots of people waving to the train as it went by. Mostly little kids with their parents, it was really cool. It was over before we knew it and we then went to the shinkansen area. They gave us a sandwich set and a juice box for dinner and we waited for our train. We then boarded the shinkansen, played a lot of DS and got home around 7pm. Once I got to my house I was really tired but I copy my pictures to my PC before I went to sleep because I was getting an error with some of them. As it turns out some of my pictures and one video did get corrupted which totally sucks. 99% of the stuff came out perfectly so I can't complain too much I guess.
Well thats it, I wrote so much about this trip I can't believe it. If you want to see some of the 1,800 pictures I took go to picasaweb.google.com/benkpomeroy2
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