Peace city with a great nightlife
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2006
1
37
52
Trip End
Ongoing
Hiroshima,
Japan
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
I'm sticking to Kirin or Sapporo on draft so I can enjoy my beers instead of drinking pish water which some of the cans are.
The Peace Park is a pretty moving place. Seeing the monuments to peace in a quiet lush garden is pretty calming. The most gobsmacking aspect I found was going through the museum and learnign all about what happened with the a-bomb seeing depictions etc then coming out and looking at the burial mound where the remains of the victims were gathered. Kinda hammers it home. In the museum we discovered that America (Winston Churchill was about as well) decided that too many American troops would be lost if they were to invade Japan so they decided to bomb it. Most of the scientist etc were against the dropping of the bomb without warning but they went for no warning for the maximum impact
Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound
. (i.e. cilvilain casualties). As an aside, on the day of the bombing they couldn't see the target for the bomb because of the weather so just dropped the bomb in the rough area.On a lighter note Hiroshima has a great nightlife. We discovered a bar on the fifth floor of a building on the egde of the entertainment district (all the places to go out tend to be altogether) called Stevie's Wunder bar. This bar was probably no bigger than my flat but was one of the best bars I've been in. The atmosphere was just great. They had motown LPs stuffed into shelfs and stacks of CDs. The owner (who we met) is a guy called Teddy Kuma. (Kuma means Bear in Japanese) chatted to us for a bit in-between DJ-ing.
We also tried a local delicacy which is basically noddles fired on a hotplate with veggies thrown on top, choice of meats/seafood and a raw egg to boot. Tastes better than this poor description honest : )
There is a good vibe to Horoshima. Just feels like a nice place to hang out and have some chilled drinks. Here was also where we parted with big Ewan. We jumped on the bullet train and sped to Tokyo. Under 5 hours to travel what I think is the length of Britain. Just great. One of the best things Japan has going for it is they do transport well. Expensive but well.
Safe Travels
Shaun
