Catch Up
It's been a little more than a week without an update. So there must be a lot to share, right? Well... actually... yea, there is plenty.
Did a bit of travelling over this past week. Spent a couple days in Kyoto (I don't know if it's fair to call that "travel" - it's only 20 minutes away), and a couple days in and around Hiroshima.
Hiroshima was really nice. Certainly pretty heavy, as we visited the A-Bomb dome, and the museum dedicated to that fateful day in 1945. The bomb apparently exploded about 600 meters above the ground and, not surprisingly, decimated everything within a few kilometers. A few buildings managed to withstand the blast. One of them, which is now known as the A-Bomb Dome, has become the center monument to that event.
When we got there, there was an eerily apropos cloud over the treeline...
A plaque near the dome has an image of the area after the bomb went off and after the ensuing fire which consumed a few square kilometers.
A Peace Park was constructed at the site of the blast, and contains numerous monuments and memorials. My personal favorite was the one dedicated to the children who died as a result of the blast, which included a lot of origami art work. All the art you see in these pictures is origami, and most of that is of paper cranes.
Other sites seen in Hiroshima include the Hiroshima Castle and the Shukkeien Garden. Having spent a year in Prague, the castle was very different from what I had come to mentally associate with castles. One thing I found interesting is the stark contrast between old and new, as the city has grown and been modernized directly outside of the castle walls.
The Shukkeien Garden was stunningly beautiful.
We stayed at a hostel about 30 minutes outside of the Hiroshima, in a town called Iwakuni. Nice place, nothing too exciting there. Did see this dude fishing, which I thought looked really cool.
A funny experience in the hostel. As I'm sure most of you know, it's custom in Japan to remove your shoes when you enter a residence, school, etc. Some places provide slippers for indoor wear. Some places require indoor slippers. Our hostel required said slippers. The lady clerk, who was incrediby nice, said in broken English, "You big. I give you velly big slippers." Hmmm....
Halfway between Hiroshima and the hostel in Iwakuni was Miyajima - a beautiful island with a rather famous gate, the O-Torii Gate. During low tide, the waters recede far enough that you can walk right up to it, which was pretty cool.
The reason for the week off was the O-Bon festival. Basically, O-Bon is the time when dead spirits return to the area. Not as a menace or because they're lost souls, but it's when they re-connect with this world. It's custom for people to visit graves of dead relatives. They don't mourn their loss; rather, they say a prayer and will lay flowers, light incense and/or bring Japanese sweets to the gravesite.
At the end of O-Bon is the Daimonji festival. For Daimonji, fires are lit in the shapes of Japanese characters on the mountains surrounding Kyoto. We got a good view of "dai."
So all in all, a good week. The best part was that within an hour of returning to work, I was given the key to my new apartment. So, after a month of sleeping on the floor and sharing a studio apartment with one (and most recently, three) other people, I finally have a place I can call home. It will be a few more weeks until I have internet access at home - I need my working visa to finish processing first - but I'm definitely turning a corner in my comfort level here.
I leave you with this. Suppose you're driving a car, and see this configuration of lights. What do you do?
Did a bit of travelling over this past week. Spent a couple days in Kyoto (I don't know if it's fair to call that "travel" - it's only 20 minutes away), and a couple days in and around Hiroshima.
Hiroshima was really nice. Certainly pretty heavy, as we visited the A-Bomb dome, and the museum dedicated to that fateful day in 1945. The bomb apparently exploded about 600 meters above the ground and, not surprisingly, decimated everything within a few kilometers. A few buildings managed to withstand the blast. One of them, which is now known as the A-Bomb Dome, has become the center monument to that event.
When we got there, there was an eerily apropos cloud over the treeline...
A plaque near the dome has an image of the area after the bomb went off and after the ensuing fire which consumed a few square kilometers.
A Peace Park was constructed at the site of the blast, and contains numerous monuments and memorials. My personal favorite was the one dedicated to the children who died as a result of the blast, which included a lot of origami art work. All the art you see in these pictures is origami, and most of that is of paper cranes.
Other sites seen in Hiroshima include the Hiroshima Castle and the Shukkeien Garden. Having spent a year in Prague, the castle was very different from what I had come to mentally associate with castles. One thing I found interesting is the stark contrast between old and new, as the city has grown and been modernized directly outside of the castle walls.
The Shukkeien Garden was stunningly beautiful.
We stayed at a hostel about 30 minutes outside of the Hiroshima, in a town called Iwakuni. Nice place, nothing too exciting there. Did see this dude fishing, which I thought looked really cool.
A funny experience in the hostel. As I'm sure most of you know, it's custom in Japan to remove your shoes when you enter a residence, school, etc. Some places provide slippers for indoor wear. Some places require indoor slippers. Our hostel required said slippers. The lady clerk, who was incrediby nice, said in broken English, "You big. I give you velly big slippers." Hmmm....
Halfway between Hiroshima and the hostel in Iwakuni was Miyajima - a beautiful island with a rather famous gate, the O-Torii Gate. During low tide, the waters recede far enough that you can walk right up to it, which was pretty cool.
The reason for the week off was the O-Bon festival. Basically, O-Bon is the time when dead spirits return to the area. Not as a menace or because they're lost souls, but it's when they re-connect with this world. It's custom for people to visit graves of dead relatives. They don't mourn their loss; rather, they say a prayer and will lay flowers, light incense and/or bring Japanese sweets to the gravesite.
At the end of O-Bon is the Daimonji festival. For Daimonji, fires are lit in the shapes of Japanese characters on the mountains surrounding Kyoto. We got a good view of "dai."
So all in all, a good week. The best part was that within an hour of returning to work, I was given the key to my new apartment. So, after a month of sleeping on the floor and sharing a studio apartment with one (and most recently, three) other people, I finally have a place I can call home. It will be a few more weeks until I have internet access at home - I need my working visa to finish processing first - but I'm definitely turning a corner in my comfort level here.
I leave you with this. Suppose you're driving a car, and see this configuration of lights. What do you do?
posted by David at 3:04 PM
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