Kyoto / Hiroshima - Friday
Sunshine again! how lucky can we get. We'd reserved the Shinkansen tickets to Hiroshima leaving Kyoto at 8:22 am and arriving at Hiroshima at 10:15 am. Fernie snoozed while I wrote and watched the moving scene. It was city after city for a while but we finally encountered some countryside between the myriad tunnels.Hiroshima has a network of trams (street cars) leaving from right in front of the station every few minutes and it's only 150 yen to ride it. It took us right to the A Bomb Dome. This grim reminder of the horror of 60 years ago made for solemn behaviour and hushed tones. The twisted skeleton of this domed former government building remained standing though all around it was razed. The explosion took place just above it about 160 metres to the southeast.
Just across the Matoyusa River lies the Peace Memorial Park on a long narrow island. There are many monuments scattered through the park remembering August 6, 1945 but the Peace Museum really took us back to the nightmare. Scraps of clothing, charred lunch boxes and the stories of some of the victims, a lot of them children, personalized it and made it so terrifyingly real.
We retreated back to current day by visiting the commercial centre. The city has been rebuilt beautifully with a wide Parisienne-like avenue - the Peace Boulevard, lined with lots of trees and attractive buildings and it's only the dome that makes you believe that the bombing ever happened.
Hungry, we wove our way into the centre looking for Okonimura, three floors of funny little food stalls serving what we came for 'Hiroshima Yaki". The mini restaurants have stools along and around a huge stainless steel cooking surface with about eight inches of wooden shelf on the front for your dishes. Right in front of you, they start by making a sort of crepe, then mounding on top chopped veggies - cabbage, bean sprouts - then spices. After a couple of minutes, on go a pile of cooked noodles (soba or or udon) - we chose udon - the fat ones and some slices of lean bacon across the top and it all sizzles tantalizingly. Then it's flipped over. Now, the smell of the bacon emanates; an egg is dropped onto the grill, the yolk gently broken, turned over and added to the top of the heap - a sprinkle of green herbs and other stuff ?? then a generous dollop of a sweet brown sauce and finished with some red shoestring pickles, all the while cooking and the flavours mingling. We were each given a little lifter / cutting utensil and we could take small bits into our bowls as the rest remained grilling. It seemed to get more and more delicious the longer it cooked. We never thought that we would be able to finish the huge pancake but with a mug of (what else?) beer, it soon dimished.
It was a difficult walk back to the streetcar after such a feast but a shopping arcade with some great little shops, where we found a few gifts helped. Our Hikari train left Hiroshima at 3:10 pm and arrived one hour and 34 minutes later in Osaka, where we changed trains for Kyoto. They anounced that we were travelling at 285 km per hour - Wow! I thought the scenery was whizzing by. We had a good view of Himeji Castle as we pulled into the Himeji station. It was only a few blocks walk but we were just too darn tired.
Our UK friends left us a message to meet them at their hotel at 7 pm and it's just five minutes around the corner. As we entered their hotel, the Rihga Royal, it seemed we weren't in Japan (Kansas?) anymore; the hordes of caucasians - the cruise folk shocked us to the realization that we needed to transform ourselves from the grotty backpackers we'd been for the last nine days to one of these cud-chewing senior citizens. NO! please don't let it happen; I'm sure we'll find a middle route.
Our friends, J&R, appeared and we joyfully hugged and it felt as if we'd seen them only yesterday. We agreed that dinner at one of the little restaurants in the station would be preferable - pricewise and atmospherically - to the hotel. So we spent a pleasant evening catching up and parted about 10 pm, all of us exhausted.
posted by O'Leary @ 10:40 PM
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