Golden Week: Hiroshima, part 3 (finally)

Am I ever going to stop talking about this boring trip that I took 3 weeks ago?! I'm also tired of it, so don't worry, this post will be the last about it! Damn! There are so many things to talk about and I'm like an old cat-lady, drivelling about the glory of her past youth.

After this post we can start talking about serious adult stuff (not that yet... but a visit to a love hotel is planed at some moment...)

Anyway. Just pull yourself together, we're almost done! Oh and by the way, just noticed how bad the quality of my pictures are, so this post is as good as useless. But stop complaining or go to hell.

I arrived in Hiroshima after a nice ferry trip. Ferries make me so happy I could cry ! I met my Couchsurfer, a nice Japanese girl with real English skills - which is very rare around here (not that the other CSers sucked at English). She's not really hosting right now as she lives with her parents, but she made an exeption for me. See, writing nice personalised requests (where you promise cooking delicious French dishes knowing you probably won't) prevents you from sleeping under a bridge and catching a cold! 

We walked around, saw the weird 'flower festival', which is some street festival with stages, weird traditional dance performances, stands of food and what ever. For the record, street fairs are as boring as in any other country, and there are the same amount of drunk people. And of sunburnt people. By the way have you ever seen a sunburnt Japanese? It's definitely worth a round trip to Japan. 

Hence the name 'flower festival'

After the fair we landed at the Peace Memorial Park, that you can see on the picture. I thought it was named after the Peace Nobel Price Japan won for stopping the whale hunt, but apparently it's because the city was bombed during World War II. I'm sure it's a marketing trick of the city, they just made that up. Come on, Americans destroying an entire city and killing thousands of civilians? No way! Wait... No it does seem legit after all. 

So the Genbaku dome (peace dome), one of the few buildings that survived the bombing, was built in 1915 by a Czech architect whose name didn't make it to the undevelopped brain cells in charge of my memory.

The dome stood because Chuck Norris was there.

The spot 600 meters upon which the bomb exploded is now a place pilgrimage for Guerilla Knitting.

What did we do next? Ahh I know. Remember when I said I suck at being organised? Well, it's true, again and again. I actually was travelling around Shikoku knowing I would come home via a night bus from Hiroshima to Kyoto on Sunday evening - because I had a Japanese test on Monday morning. But do you think I had bought my ticket? No, of course not. That would be too much thinking at once. I had checked at the beginning of the trip and the bus was almost empty - and at some point I tried to buy it online in Itaka, but it didn't work, so I just thought, hey it's ok, I'll just do it later. May I remind you that I was planing on travelling on the last day of a National holiday? The idea that the bus might be sold out in between might have crossed my mind a few seconds but didn't stay long enough for me to worry.

So in Hiroshima, I ask my CSer if she can take me to the bus station for a ticket home. I went to some desk and I was told that the night buses are full since 3 weeks. Ahahahaaha! Those Japanese people surely have a weird sense of humor. Wait, you're serious?

He was serious. So a funny idea popped in my mind: after trying out the rural areas and mastering the art of the Thumb, why not check out the mainland? Why not hitchhike 300 km on a highway? I ended up not doing that, but I gave this idea a lot of thoughts, and I still think it's possible. And I will definitely try it out one day. You just need to find a way to get you on a highway entrance, then smile and wait. And change rides at highway rest-areas. It's on! I thought, back in Hiroshima. Let's give it a go! But my CSer almost fainted at the idea of me hitchhiking at dusk, and tried to talk me out of it. I wasn't listening, I was already picturing me writing a post on this blog saying how cheap life can be. Ok, I was also picturing me not arriving in time for the exam, but who cares? 

At the end, we went home. And I had a great idea (I have some sometimes, it kind of compensates the bullsh** I keep doing): I checked the internet site of the bus company. You never know, I thought. And I was right! Apparently we went to a desk of another company, as the online bus company I was planing to take doesn't really have a real desk. Follow me? No? Get a brain. I was tricked because those suckers have buses leaving at the same time, same place, for the same price. Anyway, the bus I wanted to take was almost empty, so I could get my nice ticket. And avoid causing a CVA to my CSer and her parents, who thought I was crazy. Was not!

In order to celebrate those good news, we had dinner. To my great fortune, I was not meant to cook that night. My CSer's family invited me to the restaurant and we had Okonomiyaki, Hiroshima style. Never heard of it? People, stop thinking that Japanese people just eat sushi and soup the whole time. Give them some credit. 

Okonomiyaki is a dish that I am too lazy to describe, but basically it's a mix of an omelette with a bunch of chopped cabbage, and you top a special sauce and mayonaise on it. Here they add a kind of pancake and soba noodles to the receipe, and it's delicious. Okonomiyaki Hiroshima style is so good it literally blows your brains out, that's why it's called Hiroshima (this one is not from me but from Vickou).

Mmmmh I can't resist uploading a picture. 

  

The following day, we went to the Peace Memorial Museum, where I got the confirmation that Americans are not very nice. And that Japanese are funny people. 

The 2011 government apparently didn't get the memo, while dealing with Fukushima

By the way, this museum was very interesting, so if you are around, go there. Makes you dislike nuclear bombs. 

Then we went to Miyajima. You perhaps never heard of it, but you've surely seen the picture of the floating tori in front of a Shinto temple. Miyajima is an island located about 15km away from Hiroshima, that you can reach very easily by ferry. So my CSer took me there for the afternoon. The floating tori looks like this: 

 

I mean. It looks like this for normal tourists. But since I suck, and since life wanted to stab me in the back one last time before letting me go, of course it looked like this: 

Picture called 'loser'

Will life ever stop pissing on my bonfire? We can all agree on this that I'm not responsible in anyway for the renovations of this stupid tori. This time, I didn't screw up. Come on, life, tell me why you're being such a b**** here. Is it because I swear too much? Because I don't believe in God?! Because I once lied and said I am allergic to sea food just because I didn't feel like eating it?

Anyway, like I said, it takes more than that to take me down. Try harder, life. I will probably never go back to Miyajima and I was deeply looking forward to seeing this tori, but you won't manage to take my optimism away. 

So we went back to Hiroshima, had dinner, then I took my bus, which was almost empty. So I could take off my stinky shoes (yeah I just had 2 pairs of socks for the whole trip), lie down and sleep.

Good news, everyone: this is the end of the Golden Week trip!  No boring post anymore!