New Places and faces

June 11, 2013

Last night I was having issues with my right eye, somehow I had gotten something in there after I took my contacts out. It was bothering me all evening and still this morning I could feel something in there and I was not happy. Of course I was poking around in there trying to fish out whatever was in there and my eye was just getting more and more bloodshot. I even tried to flush it out with the showerhead, but to no avail. Luckily somewhere between Nagoya and Hiroshima it worked itself out and stopped bothering me, but I did have to wear my glasses all day and no mascara (the one makeup item I never leave the house without!), so tragic but I think it was good to give my eyes a rest.

Anyways, we said goodbye to Jen and Naoya this morning; we had an awesome time in Nagoya staying with them, trying new (to us) Japanese food, and exploring Kyoto. We went to the train station with Jen again and she got to laugh at us as we got on the train with our huge bags and tried not to knock anyone over with them. When we got to Nagoya station we booked our reserved seats all the way to Hiroshima, which were two trains with a switch in Osaka. After we got our tickets I realized that on our train out of Osaka our seats weren’t actually together but across the aisle from each other. Also, the trip was going to take three hours and Ben was sure he had seen shorter routes on Google Maps. So we decided to see if we could find a more expedient route. What we realized is that JR will put you on a train with an end destination either at the city you are going to or very close to the end and the train will have maybe four or so other stops along the way. However, there are longer distance trains that also have maybe five stops total before reaching their end destination and if the stop you want happens to be the first or second along the way, you can get to your destination much quicker. In the end we decided to get onto a train that would get us to Hiroshima from Osaka in under an hour and a half and just sit in the non-reserved seats car. We even managed to get seats together and were able to enjoy some delicious snacks of Rare Cheesecake Pocky and Caesar Salad Flavour chips. The train took us through a pretty mountainous area and we spent quite a bit of time in tunnels.

We got to Hiroshima at 12:06pm and it is definitely hotter here than it was in Nagoya or Tokyo (which makes sense because we are farther south, I will need to be even more diligent with my sunscreen and umbrella). We decided to book accommodations through AirBnb again (we used AirBnb to find our apartment in Tokyo as well) and we had very detailed instructions on how to find our place here, which involved taking a trolley through town (yes, Hiroshima has trolleys and they are totally retro and cute). We found our place no problem and were welcomed by our hosts with green tea. In Tokyo we rented an entire apartment, in Hiroshima we are renting a room and our hosts, Taso and his wife Toyo (and their beagle Lucy), are providing breakfast and dinner. They also gave us use of their washing machine; we threw in a load before going out for the afternoon and when we came back at 6:30pm I asked where I could hang it up, and Toyo had already hung everything, it was dry, and she folded everything and put it away in our room.

This afternoon we went for a walk to Peace Memorial Park, visited the A-Bomb Dome, and walked through the arcade (covered shopping street). 

The Peace Memorial Park has a museum (which we will go to tomorrow or the next day) and is full of various monuments for the casualties of the atomic bomb dropped on the city on August 6, 1945. 

The A-Bomb Dome is the remains of a building at the epicenter of the blast and is maintained as a reminder of destruction. The park was full of school children looking to ask people questions in English, so we did three mini interviews on our way through the park. The arcade was a nice reprieve from the sun, so we meandered through some shops and picked up a couple more things for people back home. We stopped for lunch at a chain restaurant called Doutor; we have walked past many of these restaurants and they all have a big sign for their shrimp and smoked salmon sandwich, so today we finally ate one (they were pretty good, and I don’t understand why we don’t have shrimp as an option for sandwiches back home; anyone reading this blog will have noticed that I pretty much go with the shrimp-based meal whenever I have the chance).

After lunch I was feeling super exhausted, so we decided to start slowly making our way back to our place. Along the way we stopped in a card game store and an American immediately came up to us and asked if we played Magic and if we lived in Hiroshima. The guy had moved to Japan with his wife (who is Japanese) and had only been here for a week and was really homesick for his Magic-playing buddies back home. Ben and I have commented to each other on several occasions during this trip that whenever we see a white guy with a Japanese girl the guy is the nerdy-ist, gawkiest, most awkward guy you could imagine; each one is worse than the next. From what we have heard, the girls go to school abroad, find a nerdy white husband, and then bring him back to Japan to suffer in silence as they wait patiently in a card store for someone who speaks English well enough to play Magic with them.

We ended up stopping in the park and just relaxing on a bench overlooking a canal and I totally passed out (I’m 100% sure that I was sleeping with my mouth open); Ben was lying on the grass next to the bench and woke me up when he sat back on the bench. Apparently I was out for over half an hour. By that time it had cooled off a bit and we walked the rest of the way back but there wasn’t anyone home when we got there. We ran into Toyo on the ground floor and she told us that there was a used car dealership just down the road (Ben’s AirBnb profile mentions that he imports cars from Japan), so she walked us down to look at the cars. They were all pretty new, high-end luxury cars, and not so much the type of vehicle that Ben imports. I told her how the cars have to be 15 years old before they can come into Canada, but people like them because even though they’re older they have low kms. When I told her that any car that you would find in Canada that is 15 years old would probably have more than 200,000 kms she was shocked.

So now we are just relaxing in our room, Lucy comes every 10 minutes or so to check on us, Toyo is preparing our Japanese dinner, and Taso is at work. Overall a pretty chill day, which is what we needed after the last couple busy days.

At 8:00pm Taso got home from work and we sat down to an amazing Japanese meal of fish, noodles, sunomono, salad and sake.

 Everything was amazing, the fish was just barely cooked on the outside and lying on a bed of onions and there was a yummy dipping sauce to go along with it. Our hosts were very gracious; I asked them why they decided to offer accommodations on AirBnb and they said they wanted to practice their English. Also, Taso told me I have a very nice voice and that it is very clear (I was making an effort to speak clearly and not mumble because English is their second language). Lucy the dog was super cute during dinner; she waited so patiently for something from the table. We had watermelon for dessert and Toyo gave her a piece and she chowed down the whole thing, rind and all. Toyo also gave Lucy the leftover sunomono noodles and I have to say it was pretty funny watching a dog slurp up noodles. All in all a pretty great first evening.