A ten minute walk saw Ekimae-dōri become Heiwa-Odōri, or Peace Boulevard, the main street in Hiroshima. The hotel I was looking for was just a couple more minutes walk from there. It is called the Toyoko Inn and is one of a chain of business hotels found in all the major cities of Japan. I stayed in the Toyoko Inn in Kumamoto with the rest of the team who went on the Red Cross sports trip back in November. It was from this experience that I knew I would like the hotel in Hiroshima and since it was in the perfect location for my purposes, I decided to go for it. It was almost exactly the same price as the ryokan in Kyoto incidentally.
Check-in wasn't until four pm so I left my rucksack behind the reception desk and went exploring. I came across this:
Now, is it me or does it appear that this duck is reading a newspaper whilst sitting on an invisible toilet?After about an hour of wandering around I got a sudden craving for some curry, so I changed my objective to seeking out a curry house. Today really was my lucky day, as I stumbled upon this restaurant after only a few minutes of looking:
“Good Smell. Good curry”. Sounds good enough for me, I thought.After settling in at the hotel for a while, I went out again and made the ten minute walk to Heiwa Kōen (Peace Park). I particularly wanted to see the Genbaku Dōmu (A-Bomb Dome). I had first seen pictures of it many years before during history lessons at school and was struck then by its desperate appearance. Being only a matter of metres from the hypocentre, it managed to stay standing because it was subjected to primarily downward rather than horizontal forces. It is now a Unesco World Heritage site.
The cenotaph, containing the names of all the known victims of the bomb. Each year at the memorial service the names of all the hibakusha (atomic-bomb survivors) who have died in the past year are added to it. Last year over 5000 more names were added.
The Children's Peace Memorial, inspired by the leukaemia victim Sadako, who believed if she folded a thousand paper cranes, her wish to be cured would come true. She died before she reached 1000, but her efforts inspired children across the world to fold cranes in the hope of one day achieving peace.
The monument for the Korean victims of the bomb. One in ten of the victims of the bomb were Korean, largely due to the fact thousands were forced into coming to Japan for slave labour by the Japanese during the war.
I had been warned that Kyoto was extremely cold at the moment but compared to Hiroshima, ha! I woke up on Wednesday morning to this image from my hotel window:
A blizzard, by English standards! And a little later, after breakfast:
Wednesday was the day I had planned to go to the island of Miyjima as a day trip and I wasn't going to let a little snow stop me. I left the hotel wearing all the clean clothes I had left in my bag, ready to spend most of the day outside. I'll talk about Miyajima in a separate post because there's quite a lot to say.
I got back from Miyajima in the late afternoon, with just enough time to see the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum. This museum is only given one line in my Lonely Planet guide book, but that was enough to convince me to see it. “... Featuring Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus...” The Salvador Dali?! The Dream of Venus?! The painting lived up to its expectations without a doubt. It was truly amazing. There were some other wonderful paintings there too, many by Japanese artists. I enjoy admiring artwork, but sometimes there is just too much to look at for me, too much to try and appreciate. This was quite a small museum however, so that suited me very well. I woke up bright and early again the following day, Thursday. No snow this time though. After breakfast in the hotel lobby and after checking out I went back to Heiwa Kōen to see the Atomic Bomb Museum. Needless to say, it was very moving. It was also very informative. I learned that, unlike Nagasaki which aimed to simply rebuild after the destruction of the bomb, Hiroshima was given a make-over too. The streets were widened, trees were planted (many of which were donated from various places from across the globe). They wanted Hiroshima to become The City of Peace and so it had to look like it. From spending three days there, I think they did a very good job. It is a really beautiful city and a lovely place to explore on foot.
To get home to Nagasaki I had to first travel to Fukuoka/Hakata. I worked out that if I went by Shinkansen to Fukuoka and then by train to Nagasaki, it would cost me well over ¥12,000, but it would only take me four hours (excluding the time it would take to change trains). I then worked out that taking a bus all the way back, changing at Fukuoka, would take me seven hours but would only cost ¥6500. I decided to go for the latter. I had already finished everything I wanted to do in Hiroshima and sitting on a long-distance bus for the afternoon, listening to my ipod and enjoying the scenery didn't sound that bad to me. And if I would be saving ¥6000 too, then all the better. After a small glitch early on, involving me getting on the wrong bus, I had a very easy journey home. It was wonderful seeing my apartment again, lying on my bed, playing on my laptop. After five days and 1700km of travelling Japan, I was absolutely exhausted. I ate some dinner, put my camera on to charge and fell asleep.*
Next, Lily Goes To Miyajima.
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