On Day 2, we got up fairly early and went to the station to find a way to Hiroshima. After concluding every other option would be too long and boring for words, we decided to use the shinkansen or 'bullet train'. The took the next available one, which was a Kodama, the slowest of the three shinkansen services, due to the fact that it stops at all stations on the line. Still, it was only around an hour between Okayama and Hiroshima, a journey which takes up to three hours using local lines.
In Hiroshima, in deference to Lesson 4 of the Voice Oral Communication textbook "Show me the way" we went to all the places the characters talk about.
Hiroshima Baseball stadium:
The A-bomb dome:
And the rest of the Peace Memorial Park:
Not in the textbook, but still of interest to me since I like castles, was Hiroshima castle.
I got another pin badge at the Peace Memorial Park tourist shop, and one in the castle, bringing my trip total to seven. I've never been so successful on such a short trip before.
After Hiroshima Castle, we decided to head to Miyajima-guchi, where our hostel was. Miyajima-guchi is the station beside the ferry port to Miyajima, another place in the textbook and a World Heritage Site. After stopping by our hostel and dropping some bags, we jumped on the ferry.
Miyajima has a large population of deer which welcome visitors by prying into their bags and trying to eat the contents.
Emily and I were eating special Hiroshima nikuman - meat dumplings - and were shocked to find a deer defying its vegetarian upbringing and trying to get at them.
Miyajima is so-called because of the shrine on the seashore on the north side of the island. The torii shrine gate is a famous Japanese image. Here are a couple of my photographic efforts:
After calling it a day at Miyajima, we followed some inaccurate directions to a cinema to see Inception, a film I didn't dislike, but fail to understand why everyone is so enamoured with.
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