Senkojisanso Onomichi

July 12: After hiroshima we decided to uplift ourselves with.... Today we have witnessed an incredible beautiful part of Japan, a part that I had no idea existed and will go out on a limb to say that today has been the best car/bus/train ride I've ever taken in my life. This is not a deliberate tour with a nice bus or anything. We just literally...

Dalsim cielom po navsteve Okayamy bola Hiroshima. Kedze tieto mesta nie su prilis vzdialene (cca 170km) a do rana sme mali kopu casu, rozhodli sme sa trochu usetrit za dialnicu a isli po okreske. Ta zhodou okolnosti viedla aj cez istu Fukuyamu. No a ked sme uz tade prechadzali, tak bolo logicke, ze sme si spravili kratku prestavku na veceru spo...

Hello from Japan, land of huge bridges, long tunnels, and small cups of green tea. These last couple weeks promise to be nice biking on smooth roads, with good food, but with lots of hills, both on the roads and in the mind, and an occasionally stormy disposition in ourselves and the weather. We've been out of the US for over 9 months now, and s...

Hiroshima was a place well recommended by many to travel to before we even came to Japan. For obvious reasons we were very interested to see the atmosphere in the city and learn more about the tragic events. It was another early morning arrival, however unlike Kyoto we were a lot more productive with our time and it really paid to be the keen to...

Should I stay or should I go? That`s the debate that`s been occupying my mind for the past couple of weeks. I would categorically decide to go home as planned, only for a girl to walk past in a delightfully short miniskirt, as if tempting me to stay. Conversely, I would decide to stay and look for a job, only for a cyclist to nearly clatter into...

On the way to Kyoto from Fukoaka I decided to stop off for an afternoon in Hiroshima, the first city in the world to be subjected to a nuclear attack. Just like Nagasak, Hiroshima is once again a thriving city with very little to indicate the horrors that happened here just over sixty years ago. The only indication is the memorial in the middle ...

People have commented that because I am Australian, I must by nature be competitive and crazy about sport. And as much as I am normally against perpetuating stereotypes, in my case it is true. To make matters worse, I am also from Melbourne, which is the sporting capital of Australia and I would argue, perhaps the world. Melbournians are truly n...

It often goes without saying that Japanese and "Western" cultures are very different, and certainly there have been many articles from ALTs previously on that very subject. The reasons I came to Japan as a JET programme participant were to learn Japanese and to live in Japanese society. These two goals are somewhat intrinsically linked, however ...

There were no alarms set this morning and what had been planned as a cooked breakfast very quickly became a cooked lunch. After a VERY relaxed meal, we headed off on a great walk to the top of what we called Mount Hattoji even though it probably wasn't! We had a great view of the surrounding area and saw a number of shrines as we took in a small...

My apologies for the delay in this log entry. We've done several really cool things the past few days and the cherry blossoms have really started to bloom nicely, so I wanted to include as much as I could for this entry. Since my last log, we have visited a variety of community pharmacies this week in the Hiroshima area. You will see in my photo...