Silver Week: Japanese Kansas is much more interesting, specially with Vulcanus! (Part 2)

Hello Ozzies!

Happy New Year 2010! The Year of the Tiger...Lion is a bit angry because his archi enemy got a year and he didn't, but since he's not the most courageous animal on Oz (in fact, courage may be too big of a word for him), he's just weeping in a corner. Anyway, I hope everybody took their raisins in time, and that their wishes and/or hopes will come true during this year (you may still have to wait a bit longer for the house on the beach and the Ferrari, though).

Long time no see, hum? My most sincere apologies to you faithful (now I presume faithless) follower - by the way, does anyone know how to add a visitor's counter to the blog? I'm curious about the amount of people who wastes his time reading nonsense like my crappy writing on the web... - You may have heard I was very busy, but believe me if I tell you that the last four months have been reeeeeally intense. Since you deserve the best, I had to wotk very hard to get you the best stories I could gather. We'll see if they are good enough.

So new year, new proposals! Here's my top 3: being punctual, being organised...and yes, catching up with the blog. We're at the end of the second week of January, and I've already been late to some appointments, so we'll have to leave that one for next year. And ferocious armies of paper piles are gathering around my desktop, so I'll have to attack fast before that proposal goes to the dust bin too. Let's see how it works for the blog.

I've decided to take it from where I left it and tell you what I have been up to in the past months. Starting from Hiroshima's trip (Good Lord, that was in September. Yet it seems as if ages had passed). Hey Boy, Hey Girl, Here we go!

Once upon a time...



Where were we? Ah, yes! We were talking about Hiroshima, just after a tasty okonomiyaki (by the way, last Friday we met a guy from Hiroshima, and he told us that the place where we ate was a crappy one! To be honest, I enjoyed it a lot! And if ours was good, I just can't imagine how the good ones taste. Maybe I'll have to come back to Hiroshima...).

So in order to digest such I nice meal, we took the Peace Boulevard and went to the Peace Memorial Park and the Peace Memorial Museum which hosts inside.

Some buildings on the way...

...And the Peace Memorial Museum!

They were so glad we finally made it!

The museum is really worth seeing, frankly speaking. First of all architectonically speaking, it was designed by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. But it is the least important reason why everybody should come to see it.  If you didn't know what kind of horrors can be related to nuclear bombing, here you know. In detail. For example, next picture shows Hiroshima just before the bombing...

...and this one Hiroshima just after the bombing. Pictures are better than words, here more than ever.

The whole museum explains the historical, social, economic and political reasons which lead to the dropping of the bombings (my heart broke when I read that one of the reasons for the bombings was to show Americans that their money from taxes was being well spent in nuclear research...). The exhibition shows testimonies of survivors, everyday objects which suffered the blast. But it doesn't stay on the before and on the moment of the bombing. It goes on with the physical sequels on the bodies of the survivors, and explains the functioning of nuclear bombs, as well as its environmental impacts. The only word which comes to my mind is heart-breaking. I hope someday we will be different, but it is quite difficult to believe such thing. We never learn, at it seems like we will never will....

Here are some pictures of the Peace Memorial Park:

This is the Memorial Cenotaph, with the A-Dome at the end of the park. It frames the Flame of Peace, which will be extinguished once the last nuclear weapon on Earth has been destroyed (which is pretty much like a long time, sadly.)

The area where the park stands now was once the city's busiest downtown commercial and residential district.

There are a lot of paper cranes everywhere. This is due to Sadako Sasaki, a girl victim of the bombings. She developed leukaemia at 10, at she believed that if she was able to fold 1000 paper cranes, she would recover (paper cranes are associated in Japan with longevity and happiness). She couldn't make it. Her school mates finished the work for her. But it soon spread, and you can see many paper cranes everywhere around the park.

Here's a link to a video of the Peace Bell at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. I put in Youtube, because with the new interface of Blogger is not that easy to add videos directly to the page.

Just writing about this brings back the whole feeling of being there. There are no words for human imagination when it comes to destroying ourselves...Really, it is like when I went to Dachau in Munich. Your soul simply falls to the ground, and the only thing you can do is cry. There is no place for hope when you see with your own eyes what we're capable of doing for God knows what reason...

Time to dry tears and move on: This is the baseball team of Hiroshima, Hiroshima's Carps (remember Hiroshima's castle?)

I don't know if I mentioned something about it in the previous post, but Silver Week trip to Hiroshima was organized in an incredible rush: in something like 72 hours we charted a route, decided where to sleep, what to see, etc. And the big issue when preparing trips like this (specially on hot dates like the Silver Week in Japan) is that hostels just don't pick up the phone and gently say: 'Room for 10? Sure, we've got plenty!' Most cases, what you get is closer to '10...Did you say 10? 10!'...and then the pi pi pi of the phone when the other side has hung up. This was obviously our case, of course: Out of 5 nights, we only managed to reserve something like two (the first and the second one). But, - surprise, surprise! - the night of the second day turned out to be located in a rather inconvenient place (like 10km away from the nearest train station, with the last train arriving there at 5pm, and at least 3 changes of train to get there). so there we were, in Hiroshima, walking around with a 1-week knowledge of Japanese and no place to sleep for the following nights!

Rush, rush, rush, and out of the hat we had to pop out a completely improvised Youth Hostel in Kurashiki. Depending on the guide you take, you may not even find it. It doesn't mean it was not worth it, though. Some of its streets still keep the charm of the old Japan. Some that you may not find by any means in some of the arguably top 10 places to see in Japan. But that's a different story...

Kurashiki has at his center a whole district from the Edo period surrounding a canal of water. It is a very quiet, peaceful place to relax, walk around and taste a bit of the old Japan.

Ok, here it doesn't look like it...But our Edo houses are somewhere past the bricks!

And guess what! They have an amusement park dedicated to The Wizard of Oz!!!!! There's Toto, and Dorothy, and the scarecrow...All of them. Isn't it a wonderful coincidence?

It was already dark when we got to Kurashiki's station, and the owner of the hostel was already waiting for us. As I said, we were supposed to sleep here only for one night, but since Matsue, or Izumo, or anything remotely near to these places was fully packed up, we extended our stay another night. Respectable bedding, tidy place,...

The only inconvenient was the curfew (around 10pm). Which meant only 1 hour to have dinner. (Short break here: Does someone know why the Polish call supper to what it's actually lunch? I've been trying very hard to understand why someone would call in English 'supper' to the evening meal, instead of using the word lunch. I mean, if there's a word in English which actually means that, why would you use another English word which means something different? No matter how many times you try to explain them that in fact their translation is wrong, they keep on calling it 'supper'. I guess cultural shocks don't come only from Japanese culture...)

Pepe, using that well-trained golden mouth of his - and more important, his incredibly amazing Japanese sentence book of Lonely Planet. Guys, if you're ever considering about coming to Japan, buy that book. It's like Nostradamus' book and Baden-Powell's Scout Book, all in one: everything you may need, or you can think of, is condensed in a wonderful sentence inside. The creepy part here, is that the examples used may be strangely similar to what you want to say. Let me put an example: we were taking the Shinkansen from Tokyo St. to Hiroshima, and we didn't know at what time did it leave. We open the book and...what do we find? 'Could you please tell me when the next Shinkansen for Hiroshima leaves?' Creepy... - convinced the owners of the hostel to give us one hour more (which at the end became 1h30'...hehehe). And off we went! the Youth Hostel was located on top of a hill, near a Buddhist cemetery. No street lights, not even a pedestrian pathway (now you know why they picked us up at the train station,lol).

As we had a bit of an issue with the curfew, we ended up in the first restaurant we saw open...a Jonathan's. The joy of any gipsy in Spain (because of the name, nothing else!). The call it "A family restaurant". One of these chains of restaurants that are soooo common in Japan, with "American & European" "food". I put different inverted commas for each, because I still doubt you can call that piece of junk "food", and that "cooking style" "American & European" (I should think if a different term for what they do to raw food, something nearer to torture, if the ingredients could talk). At least that's what they presume they do if you read the menu. Inside the kitchen, a completely different story goes on. I don't even believe you can call it a kitchen: massive gastrintestinal destruction zone is a more accurate term...Anyway, it was something we could eat, and we needed to eat, so...but I will always remember the face of Davide while reading the menu, specially the part dedicated to Pasta & Pizza. Special mention deserves the so called "tiramisu". Something to see (not to taste, of course!).

At least Marcin go to have a taste on some real potatoes which he misses very much from Poland!

Oh! And this is a funny ad I found on a cigarettes machine. Very much in the old American 50s style...Although the sentences use a funny English, don't you think?

After that, straight to bed.

See you Ozzies.

Off with the lights Toto!