Hiroshima

We're back from our three day trip to Hiroshima. Here are some highlights. Kate's in the process of editing our pictures and putting them on deviantArt.

Every trip in Japan has to involve food in some way. You can buy magazine style guidebooks to pretty much every region in Japan, and each one devotes pages and pages to food. Hiroshima's local specialties include oysters and okonomiyaki with noodles. Kate benefitted more than I did. On the one hand, she likes oysters a lot more than I do, and on the other hand, she can eat okonomiyaki without dying. The word "okonomiyaki" means, roughly, fried (stuff) that you like, and yet a key ingredient is egg, which I don't really like at all, since it kills me.

Of course we did plenty of sightseeing. Miyajima came highly recommended, and was well worth it despite being about an hour and a half away by street car and ferry. A fact that seems to go unmentioned in a lot of the websites about the place is that the island is populated by lord knows how many deer who are all quite small, oh so cute, and almost entirely tame. They only give you trouble if you tease them with food.


The running of the deer

Other sights included the archerific Kintaikyo bridge and Hiroshima Castle. But of course most of our attention was focused on the Peace Memorial Park. We visited once each day. On the first day, we walked around the park checking out all the memorials; on the second, we walked through at night; and on the third we went through the Memorial Hall and Museum. More on that tomorrow.