So. Hiroshima! :D
(Hint: if you click on the pictures, you'll see bigger versions.)
Last weekend I went to visit Saori, a college friend, during one part of a vacation that is called "Silver Week." During Silver Week, the Japanese have a national holiday on Monday, September 19th (Respect of the Aged Day), and Friday, September 23rd (Autumn Equinox, a national holiday-- how cool is that?! :D ).
On Friday the 16th I hurried out of school to make it back to Takeo, pick up my suitcase, and book it to Takeo-onsen Station to catch my express train up to Fukuoka. That train took about an hour, then I had a half-hour wait in Fukuoka (it was a rather bizarre period of time, because I recognized so much from 5 years ago but it was all so distant). Then I caught the Shinkansen up to Hiroshima... and promptly got motion sick. The Shinkansen traverses at least four times the distance my little express train did in one hour, but it does so by slicing through mountains. All those tunnels were like a motion sickness trap waiting to happen, and I stepped right into it. So I put away the novel I brought and leaned back in my chair and practiced some deep breathing and meditation techniques to keep from spewing all over the fancy expensive seats.
Here are some fancy photos of the Shinkansen, or Bullet Train, for all of you who haven't seen it/don't know about it.
Can you see it in the distance? It's coming! :D
Shinkansen! So fast! So sleek! So slender! So...
whoosh!Yes. That was the beginning of a relationship that looked something like this:
Long white snake-like train + dark tunnels x 60 minutes = One Sick Mary.
Anyway, finally, Hiroshima!
I stumbled out of the Long White Snake Train and stumbled around Hiroshima, rather confused. Of course, it didn't help that to get to the south gate I had to wander up, and then down, and then onto a train platform and around a corner, and through a secret door. (Okay, maybe it wasn't
quite that convoluted, but the whole going-on-another-train's-platform-and-around-a-corner did throw me a bit.)
It was 9 at night, and it was a massive relief to see Saori waiting for me, looking killer (and much more professional than me) in a lavender shirt and black slacks. Reminded me of my goal in Hiroshima-- get pants that fit. We walked to her apartment in the rain, and sat around talking late into the night, happy to see a familiar face.
Saori had just moved to Hiroshima to be an English teacher at a
juku, or cram school. So we were both freshly moved, brand-new English teachers, both of us missing San Francisco and having old friends near, and so we had a lot to talk about.
The next day, Saturday, Saori had to go to work, so I broke out the novels I'd been wanting to read, talked with my boyfriend on video chat for a wonderfully long time, and wandered around Hiroshima eki to find some tourist pamphlets. It was a wonderful quiet day-- refreshing after about a month of non-stop movement.
Sunday Saori had the day off, and so I got out to see some of Hiroshima. I have been to Hiroshima before, seen ground zero where the atomic bomb went off during World War II, the Genbaku Dome which is one of the only surviving buildings from the bomb, and the museum that chronicles all the details about the bomb and how it melted people so they looked like wax statues that had been in the sun too long. All
very sad things. This time I only wanted to do happy things in Hiroshima, and see the city that survived and thrived and regrew from the atomic disaster.
It is was an intense emotion to sit in an apartment and know the city had been flattened, and remember all the problems that the Japanese had to deal with nuclear fallout, and then remember the atomic conundrum that still haunts the east coast of this nation. They are still finding dangerously high amounts of radiation on the east coast, all the way down to Tokyo. Please do not support nuclear power-- when there are problems, it effects a whole bunch of people. I am probably doing pretty bad things to a lot of my cells living here... but we won't really know what happens to us until we're older. All that came swirling back to mind as I wandered the streets that had once been flattened-- and I come back to what I thought when the earthquake first happened, which is I want to be able to help, and Japan needs help.
On Sunday, the first thing Saori and I did was walk to Shukkeien (which has incredibly difficult to read kanji, since all I have is a calligraphy version that I can't read, so no kanji this time).
Here we are, on the walk there.
And here's me at the entrance:
Sukkeien was built by Ueda Soko, a tea master, as a garden for Nagakira's villa back in 1620. It was destroyed in the atomic blast and then rebuilt. It features a large pond with many little islands, and all the little geographic areas are supposed to represent much bigger geographical locations-- mounds become mountains, islets become large islands, etc.
Here I am, standing by the lake.
The garden was incredibly peaceful, and made me want to participate in a tea ceremony
so bad. There was one cabin-like building that at one point was probably used as a cabin, where the family slept, but now is probably used mainly for tea ceremony and other ceremonial events. It also made me want to own a bunch of land and build a path through it. The land reminded me a lot of Californian forests, which is very comforting and calming.
So we went down to the water to see a turtle... who promptly started scrambling on the rock in order to grin at us.
... and then he called all his turtle and fishy buddies....
There were about 15 of those little turtles! D: And countless fishy friends.
The park also had a really big, really cool bridge!
Of course I scrambled up it. And then... had a very difficult time scrambling down, since I was a.) in high heeled sandals, b.) the steps were deceptively steep, c.) they were made of marble, which is rather slick. I managed not to slip and slide down the bridge on my butt, which would have been awkward... but admittedly amusing.
Then, we got to my favorite part of the garden-- stepping stones! :D
I love stepping stones! I was all, "Oo, there are fishies! 8D "
Then I was like, "You took a picture of me doing that? Saori, you jerk! xD "
Then I had to explain to Saori something I love about koi: "I love how they have four fins. Like, hand fins!" Mary exclaims, waving boobie fin-hands, "and feet fins!" and she waves her hands around her hips to pantomime feet fin-hands...
...then finds out Saori was taking a picture of me making the fin-hands.
After Shukkeien, Saori and I walked around shopping lots and talking more. I got two pairs of pants that worked well, a skirt for 340 yen (about 4 bucks), and an AWESOME fuzzy sweater, which you will see lots of pictures eventually, probably.
Then we went to Karaoke, and sang lots and lots and LOTS. It was pretty awesome, since we both knew English and Japanese, so we sang a great medley in both languages. My favorite happened to be this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_071n8CYC4
This is the long one with the long opening, so if you want to hear the parts I liked singing, skip to a minute in.
One really cool thing: my voice has really opened up in the past two years, so I was able to hit all the high notes! Yay me! xD And also, Saori had sung the alto part for middle school, so we harmonized incredibly beautifully.
Lastly, we went to Purikura! 8D OMG, PURIKURA, I LOVE YOU!!!
For all of you not in the know, purikura are small little sticker pictures you can get from photo booths. And they but American photo booths
TO SHAME. I mean, can you make this sort of awesome in an American photo booth?
Here's our full photoshoot:
Love you guys!
Peaceout!
~Meab
P.S. The second half of Silver Week was a mix of awesome and not awesome. The awesome bit was shopping with friends in Fukuoka and laughing until my stomach hurt and my cheeks ached. That is an
excellent kind of exhaustion. The not awesome part was collapsing that night, so I missed a friend's concert, and then collapsing the rest of the next day, and missing another friend's concert. Two concerts missed (I feel so unmusical! D':), and sleeping from 7 p.m. until 7 a.m., and I might look reasonably like a human being again.
* Photos of Shukkeien courtesy Saori's cell phone, and the purikura courtesy the purikura booth. I pretty much only remembered to get my camera out when the shinkansen came.
