Friday, October 6, 2017 – Miyajima, Hiroshima and Nagoya

When I wake, up our lone roommate has already stripped her bed and vacated the premises.  We never even saw her face!  It’s drizzling outside and it’s a very good thing that we didn’t set an alarm to get up for sunrise photos!!

We do the morning stuff and ask JC if we can leave our pack backs here while we go back to the island.  He says we can leave them downstairs and we do that, after agreeing that breakfast on the island beats toast, juice and coffee/tea here at the hostel!

The drizzle isn’t too bad and I’ve got a zip lock for my camera.  Ginger has a throw-away poncho and we’re all set.  When we get off the ferry we plan to walk down to the tori gate before we do anything else.  The weather may get worse, after all, and the photos aren’t too grand right now as it is!  It is really cool, though, to see the mist on the mountains and the disturbed water surface.  Sure glad we got those reflection photos last night!  It’s still fun to play around and try to get moody atmospherics.

There is a deer with antlers!  We didn’t see any yesterday and wondered if perhaps the authorities in charge had sawed them off.  After a bit we see one of the “unarmed” guys attack the antlered one!  Maybe that’s why he doesn’t have antlers any more! I see one take a lady’s pamphlet right out of her back pocket!  Dale reminded me in an email of his trip to Miyajima with Reiko.  That darn deer ate their map to their hotel, and the hotel had to send a car to fetch them!  It was hard to believe until I saw these guys in action!! 

It’s still raining.  We duck into one of the little shops and do a bit of souvenir hunting, then go a little further down and find a delightful place for brunch.  It has received a Trip Advisor award for excellence and is quiet and almost empty.  We should have paid more attention to the fact that the front window is filled with growing oysters!  Nearly everything on the menu features them.  Apparently they are a local specialty and every restaurant offers them. Instead we order fried chicken and split an order of tempura vegetables.  Can’t go wrong with fried foods!  Guess we’re getting a little home sick.  The chicken comes as four big balls of chicken that are coated and fried and delicious!  The tempura vegetables are always wonderful.  We have lotus and green pepper and mushrooms and eggplant and that vegetable that looks and tastes like sweet potato, but has green skin!

Shortly after we begin eating, a horde of school kids fill the place and the mood swings dramatically!  They are all really cute, though, and it’s fun to get caught up in their excitement. Ginger gets an omiyagi for oysters for Sachiko.  We’ve left the money for our lunch sitting on top of the bill and start to walk out.  That’s wrong!  We were supposed to bring it up to the cashier;  but one of the staff counts it out and says we’re okay!

The rain continues and we head for the ferry and back to the hostel to pick up our heavy back packs and move on.  The girls tell us that we can take the JR train and then switch to a bus to get to the Peace Park.  They’re very distressed that I don’t have an umbrella and won’t let me leave without one!  I tell them we’re not coming back and they say that’s all right, just leave it somewhere!  We recall seeing this done the last time we were in Japan, at a restaurant.

This time we take the underground route to the JR station and don’t get quite as wet.  We find our train and then follow directions to a street car.  A helpful attendant gives us a map and marks our stop for us, so as we’re riding we check the stops off and giggle every time the streetcar makes a turn we’re expecting! We get off at the right stop and think we’re home free until two attendants come after us!  The girls had said it was free with our JR pass; but it’s not!  It’s only a dollar or two and we’ve learned something!

It’s still raining.  The Peace Park is right in front of us and we stop to read about it and try to learn the layout.  The entire park used to be a residential area that was leveled by the atomic bomb that we dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.  There are numerous monuments and remembrances throughout the park.  The most physically impressive is called the Atomic Bomb Dome.  It’s the remnant of a huge building that served various purposes during its history, including serving as a government building and performance hall.  It was topped by a green dome, the structure of which remains. It is chilling.  

 There is a monument to the 10,000 Koreans who were living in Hiroshima then and were killed by the blast. The most poignant is the Children’s Memorial.  You might recall Sedako and the Thousand Paper Cranes if you’re into YA literature.  She was a real little girl who died at ten years of age, as result of her exposure to radiation.  School children all across the country joined in a plea to the world to never use atomic weapons again.  They folded thousands of cranes and they are on display in an arc around a statue to Sedako and children everywhere. 

The cenotaph

The clock is set for 8:15, the time the bomb exploded.

There is a museum and a cenotaph and several graves stones and many places that would be beautiful and photo worthy, if not for this pesky umbrella and the continual droplets on my lens!  I finally resort to using my iPhone because I can do that one handed, after a fashion.  We agree that we are saturated, both physically and emotionally, and enter the museum shop to find a place to sit and regroup, where it is dry and warm.  There are no empty tables and we share one with a young couple from the Netherlands.  They are personable and charming and quite tickled to learn of Ginger’s Dutch roots!  We chat about their adventures and ours and it turns out that they are also ready to leave and are taking the same streetcar we are, to the JR Hiroshima station!  They get their things from their locker and we set off, back along the path we followed into the park and then figure out how much change we need for all four of us to ride the streetcar.

When it comes, it’s pretty crowded and we have to stand for about half the trip.  It’s just a little trickier with all the extra stuff, especially since some of it is wet!  Happily some seats open up and that’s really nice! When we get off and start to head inside, it’s time to say good-bye and thanks for all the help.  The kids are looking for something to eat, and we find the JR ticket office. There we learn that there are no reserved seats available until the seven something train!  That’s way too late, so we opt for an earlier one and will take our chances on getting seats.

On the way to track 14 we stop for buy some munchies.  We had told Tae that we’d be home after dinner so she wouldn’t have to worry about feeding us.  So we need to feed us!!  We have no clue what we’ve bought; but we haven’t gone wrong yet!

When we get to track 14 and read about the next few trains to arrive, there’s an earlier one that stops in Nagoya and has three cars with non-reserved seats.  It’s worth a shot!  It’s just pulling in as we figure this out and have to hustle to the front of the train where those cars are!  We wouldn’t quite make it, so a conductor tells us to get on car number four and walk through the train!  Good plan!  We get all the way to car number one without finding two seats together and opt for one behind the other.

I settle in and start to type; but Ginger is paying attention and after a couple of stops a three-seat row opens up and we snag it!  We should be back to Nagoya in a couple of hours and will call Tae to let her know where we are.  When we get to Kyoto we know that Nagoya is the next stop, so we hurry up and eat our dinner.  We’ve got sweet rice in a crispy shell and some sort of tiny dumplings that are individually wrapped and then vacuum sealed.  When we get to Nagoya, we'll take the subway one stop to Kaniyama Station, take the south exit and wait for her.  It will be so good to see the family again – and to have dry clothes and shoes and a hot shower!!

Iori’s field day tomorrow has been postponed due to the weather, and is rescheduled for Sunday, so we should still be able to go.  And we need to do something for Andy’s birthday, which is Monday, the day we leave.

Well – best-laid plans and all that – we know that our stop should be only one away from the Nagoya station.  What we don’t know is that there are two similar-sounding cities, Kanayama and Kamiyama!  We can’t get through to Tae by Face Time or text or phone and decide to just ask the ticket agent and hope for the best.  Up on the track we ask a young woman is we can use her phone, in hopes that the call will go through on a local phone.  It rings busy, which is better than we had before!  We talk with the young woman and she says she is going to Kamiyama, which is where we think we’re going and she agrees that it is only one stop.  We finally get through to Tae and she says that’s where we’re going, so we hope on the train. We learn that she is actually from Brazil and is here learning Japanese and English.  She’s so good at Japanese that when Tae speaks with her later, Tae thinks she’s Japanese! When the train stops at the first station we gather our things to get off, and our new friend says, “No, it’s an hour away!”  We need to get off and to tell Tae we’ll be later than we thought!

We hop on the next train going in the opposite direction and it shows up almost immediately.

Back at Nagoya, we go back to the ticket agent and ask for the train to Kanayama!  He sets us straight and this time it really is only one stop!  We get off and go out the south gate, as directed.  It’s still raining.  We are to meet at the square and hope we’ve got the right place.  We wait in the bus shelter and debate what to do if we’re in the wrong place!  Our phones still won’t connect, so we’re pretty much at the mercy of the fates.

It’s only a few minutes and our savior appears!  We’re inside, out of the rain, and so very happy to see Tae!!  She takes us home and the kids have just finished their baths with Sachiko.  Two clean, happy kids come running into the living room!

We play a bit before their bedtime, then Tae goes to pick up Andy so he doesn’t have to walk home from the train in the rain.  We’re all exhausted, but it’s so good to have another great conversation with Andy and Tae that we have a glass, or two, or so, of sake and stay up well past midnight.

There will be an email at 7:30 in the morning, saying whether Iori’s field day has been postponed.  If it’s a go, we’ll leave right away and go to the coffee shop for breakfast.  Then we’ll walk to the park for field day because the parking there is

quite limited.  It’s going to be a short night!  We’ve both had restorative hot showers and Ginger put on her PJs.  Mine, like everything else in my back pack, are soaked, so I just put my clothes back on.  We’ll see in the morning what has been damaged beyond repair.  Hopefully, nothing!!

We crawl next door and Sachiko has set up our futons for us.  What a blessed sight!