Day Fourteen: Osaka + Hiroshima (Wherein we dine at a traditional Australian eatery)

We're back in the present! Yay!

The time of the retrospective posts is ended! Well, that's not quite accurate - this post is technically retrospective, I guess. So are all of them. I should do more liveblogging. At any rate, we're now reporting on yesterday and not anywhere further back. I think you probably understood that from the start, but there it is explained nonetheless.

Busy, busy day today. We went to Hiroshima. Spent pretty much the whole day there, in fact, which means that despite staying in Osaka, we really haven't actually done anything here. And we're headed for Takayama tomorrow, so the secrets of this city will for now remain a mystery to us.

Anyway, we got up and made for the train station, stopping first to meet our good friend Mr. Donut for breakfast. Getting to Hiroshima took 1.5 hours in something called the 'silence car' of a Shinkansen. Ostensibly, the car is silent. No announcements are made, the people selling drinks don't say anything and you're not meant to talk. We observed this rule, fearful of being told off for poor train etiquette, even if no one else did. It was less noisy than the party that was going on two rows back on our train to Kyoto, but to call it silent would be stretching the truth to breaking point.

We were scheduled to meet Steph at Hiroshima Station, an act which took far more effort than we thought it would. But after 20 minutes of waiting for each other in totally different locations, we met up and headed for Miyajima Island.



The place was a strange one. Half spectacular views, half interesting shrines and half crummy tourist traps (I realise that adds up to 1.5, but thirds sounded clunky and I am feeling like a particularly lazy writer at 1:14am), the place had something for everyone. There were even more deer. I saw one eat a guys paper shopping bag as he held it. They were awesome.

The highlight of the visit was the Itsukushima Shrine and it's floating torii gate. Built out over the water, it's a fancy boardwalk in a lot of ways, but the view was really cool. On the other side, a man was making a seemingly unwilling monkey do tricks. At that point, we decided to turn back. After a another meal of that pancakey-omlettey thing (I can't be bothered checking the spelling at the moment), we got off the island and headed back into the centre of town.

From there we went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. We arrived in time to visit the museum, but not the hall of remembrance unfortunately. It was a very sombre, sobering experience, especially afterwards as we wandered around the many memorials that dot the park, and as we stood next to the A-Bomb Dome. Not too much more to say about it, except that if you're ever in Hiroshima, you have to go there. I'm not sure how affecting it will be on any of us in the long run, but for now it certainly has had an impact.

Onto more fun subjects. We got delayed getting back to Osaka due to the trains being packed for some reason. I had wanted to visit a bookstore in the city which closed at 9pm. We got in at 8:30. We got to the right station at 8:45. Yet somehow, we made it in and out and I got a fresh copy of The Economist (to which Ali has recently converted) at a much more reasonable price than what was going in Sapporo. We also noticed how Obama-rama has swept Japan, each and every book ever written on Barrack was on display - not only at this store, but every one we have been to thus far. The store also featured Obama's victory speech playing on repeat.

We had planned to eat at a place near the bookstore but found it to be closed. That left us with only one other option: an Outback Steakhouse we had passed a few blocks earlier. Daniel vigorously opposed it. I was hungry for Western food, though, and the thought of eating at a restaurant themed with Australian culture as viewed through the lens of a multinational corporation and the Japanese food market was too much to resist. Ali was thinking the same thing, so we flipped a coin. And the rest is history...



The place was bizarre. Cowboy hats made random appearances. The toilets were labelled "blokes" and "sheilas". A pair of Mexican looking statues sat on one mantle, and in between was a crocodile in sunglasses holding a beer. VB was on the menu, as were "Aussie Cheese Fries", a dish which does not exist in its purported country of origin. Despite all of that, though, the food was pretty good.

And that's everything up to date. We're in Takayama next, then Shirakawa-go, and then I head home. Daniel and Ali will no doubt keep you posted on goings-on from Hakuba and Tokyo.

-Nik