We had to say goodbye to Kyoto and to our nice spacious apartment. We are batting 1.000 on AirBnB accommodations, though we only have two more on our itinerary.
We got to Kyoto station and transferred to Shin Osaka station to board our 3rd Shinkansen train... this time bound for the historic city of Hiroshima.
When we got to our hotel we were a couple of hours early for checkin so we ditched our bags and walked over to the Atomic Bomb memorial and museum.
What can I say - it was horrific. It's everything you can imagine, but the biggest thing that struck me is that when the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, basically nobody in the world knew that that weapon existed. The explosion, the fires and radiation that followed, the black rain that followed that... there was simply no knowledge on the ground about what had happened, how they should treat people and what was safe to eat and drink.
The park the Japanese built to commemorate the devastation is beautiful. We met dozens of school children on a trip from Osaka that were not shy about trying out their English.
After a little chill time (where I schooled Abby in the mechanics and customs of Sumo which we are seeing on Sunday and which is on TV now daily), we set out for dinner.
Hiroshima is relaxed like Osaka, yet much more modern (no building is over 70 years old....). It sill has the great retail covered streets that Osaka made famous and the shops and restaurants (and people) are chok-a-blok as usual.
We had dinner in a somewhat famous, tourist oriented place called Okonomi-mura - a play on words between Okonomiyaki and Mura or "village". The place has three floors and twenty some odd vendors making various forms of Okonomiyaki - a local specialty food that is also found all over Japan. It's basically a pancake type of food made on a teppan grill - ours had egg noodles, cabbage, beef, bean sprouts, a crepe topping and yakisoba sauce... delicious!
It's movie night so the girls are watching Mean Girls on Netflix... that would have been an appropriate title at times throughout the day. The sniping at each other wore a little thin today, however, as usual we just needed a few moments of recharge time and they quickly became more like Thelma and Louise!
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