Recommencing the broadcast

Yeah yeah, I know, it's been a long time since I last did anything in this bit of webspace.

Well, I'm pretty well settled into Shanghai, by now, and life here is fantastic. But! It's not time to tell that story yet. I've got catching up to do, so I'm going to tell the rest of Japan now, then get to Korea, although Korea might be slightly abbreviated, depending on my mood.

Where we last left off, I was leaving from Osaka towards destinations further west, and my first stop was going to be Himeji.

Himeji is an old castle town in Japan; its castle was one of the first UNESCO listed sites in Japan, and its castle is by far the main focus of the entire city. When you leave the train station, you look down the street directly at the castle on a hill, albeit a mile or two away.

I didn't get to visit castles anywhere else thus far, so it was also high on my list, and I'm glad it was. Unfortunately, that day was pretty miserable. It was pouring rain, and I had to stow all of my stuff in a coin locker, a sort of locker that's ubiquitous at major train and metro stations all throughout Japan (and Korea, as I would later find out). I trotted along, and realized the umbrella I had with me at the time was pretty crappy for the task, so I went into a convenience store and bought a more sturdy one for about 10 dollars, and tried to offer my smaller one to some people who didn't have any, but to no avail, so I left it on a planter edge somewhere.

I walked further down that main avenue, and tried to take a picture, but my camera failed me, and its battery died, so I ducked into a cafe to charge the battery for a while. I bought a cup of coffee, and I guess I appeared to be sorely out of place for some reason, to the lady who was working there. I'm not sure why, exactly. But while sipping my cup of coffee, she brought over a book and a pen, without any explanation beyond a soft smile across her face.

I opened the book, and realized that apparently this lady has been maintaining this signature book of sorts from travellers over the course of several years. It must be that its a popular last stop before going into the castle, or right after exiting it. After I got past my initial surprise, I jotted into it myself a bit, then returned it to the lady. I just really didn't expect to see something like this in an unassuming cafe. Atop Mt. Fuji? Sure. Next to a croissant? Not so much. But it seemed like it was a sort of personal project for this woman, and I thought that was pretty cute.

After I felt my camera charged enough, I went back outside, and immediately snapped off a couple shots.

Honestly, there isn't a lot more to say about Himeji, or the castle itself, so I'm just going to drop off some photos from it, and let that speak for itself, then get on to the Hiroshima part of my adventure.

I scurried off quick as can be after that, intent on getting into Hiroshima the same night, although I had no reservations for anywhere, and had no idea where I'd be heading.

When I got in, it was probably around 8pm, so the sun was well down by this point. There was no real possibility of stowing away my backpack etc at this point, as I had no idea if it'd be feasible for me to trip back after finding a place to stay. At first I just tried to wander on my own to find a place near the train station, but soon enough it was clear that that'd be impossible, so I scoped out a info desk back at the train station, and asked them for some recommendations; they gave me a name and a phone number, and recommended I call ahead, but I decided it'd be better if I just booked it for the place and hoped for the best; I asked for some directions, hopped on a trolley, and walked in the direction I had been given.

When I showed up, they didn't have any space. The girl working there was pretty young, maybe around 25 or so. She was incredibly nice, though, and really wanted to help me. She called around to a few different places to find a place for me to stay the night, and gave me some ears of corn that her grandmother had grown while I waited, which was quite an unexpected treat.

After maybe four or five phone calls, she finally found a place that had space. Oddly enough, it was only about half a block away, and it called itself a ryokan; ryokans are the traditional style of hotel in Japan that's pretty frickin fantastic, if you get the legit kind, but this was no such thing. It ended up being a more than sufficient room to while away the next two nights, but it was certainly nothing to write home about (although I suppose that's technically exactly what I'm doing right now).

I asked the old man attending the place for recommendations on how to make my life not worthless that evening, but, he didn't have much to offer, so after cleaning up a bit, I just chose a direction and headed out. I wasn't carrying anything with me beyond my passport/wallet, but I still managed to become sufficiently drenched over the course of the next few hours in my own sweat. At first, everything was copasetic, and I somehow managed to find my way towards a small nightlife district, and wandered into an American style bar, where I sat and had a drink or two while being thoroughly disappointed by the insular nature of the foreigners in the place, and headed straight back out, in the direction I thought I had come from. For one of the only times in my entire trip, my sense of direction failed me; I wandered a lot of quiet empty streets, and empty quiet underpasses and subterranean pedestrian hubs. Call me crazy, but it felt as though I was transversing a shell of a city, that, although rebuilt in quite grandiose form, was emptied by the bomb.

Eventually I ran into a river, which is the main river that rolls north/south through the city, which was a pretty useful way marker to find the path back to my hotel. I realized I had gone in the totally wrong direction, and was basically a couple of miles off course at best. I walked back, though, without too much of a hassle. Hanging over my walk was the spectre of the night-lit A-Bomb Dome, as its known; a building that the bomb exploded more or less directly over, but managed to stay relatively intact, to the extent that the frame of the dome on the top of the building, though twisted, was unbroken. I didn't have my camera with me at the time, but the lighting that they have installed for nighttime was something that brought up ideas of a post-apocalyptic landscape. I did take pictures the next day, but I'll put those up when I get to that part of the story.

The next morning, I got up and went straight towards Miyajima, if I recall correctly. I actually wasn't going to stay in Hiroshima a second night, I remember now, so I dragged all of my stuff with me through the details of what I did over the next twelve hours or so.

Miyajima is a beautiful island just off the coast of Hiroshima, home to a wonderful shrine widely photographed, and now photographed just a bit further thanks to my own efforts. The island is also host to a few other nice historical buildings, and a plethora of deer! The deer are really friendly too.

Picture time! This is some stuff from Miyajima.

Pagodas and palm trees. What more needs to be said?

This here was a shine of some sort, I guess. What I didn't realize until it was a bit too late was that you had to pay to enter, and that you could only enter from one side. It just looked like a shack in a pretty place to me, so I assumed you could tramp through as you please; the guard at the exit giving me a dreadful stare as I'm drenched through to the bone with sweat, carrying 55 lbs of stuff, showed me otherwise.

On my way back from Miyajima, I took a trolley again towards central Hiroshima. Its a fairly long trolley ride, upwards of 30 minutes, maybe even closer to an hour. To my left sat a small Japanese family, faced across the aisle by a big, white, American Mormon trying to convert them. The daughter, who looked like she was about 15, occasionally looked to me with desperation. She was clearly not in search of a change in her preference of spiritual salvation. The parents were far more receptive, though I suspect this was mostly related to the fact that, as far as I could tell, this American man spoke flawless Japanese. I just couldn't help but laugh at the situation somewhat, and left it at that.

Directly across from me, I found, eventually, was a girl about my age, and her mother. At first, there were people standing in the middle of the aisle that blocked my view. The girl across from me was fairly cute, so, despite my overtly gross condition from having bathed in my sweat for a couple hours, I thought I'd try to make some point of contact with her. While considering for a short time what the easiest "in" would be, as she appeared to be fairly stoic at first, eventually, she made a silly face, the kind that people make when they're not really thinking about the world around them. So, I imitated her, intentionally making a caricature of her own gesture, and when she realized it, she giggled a bit, and I knew it was on.

Over the course of the next 10 minutes, we exchanged a variety of silly faces and glances, and nothing more than that. Then, some small thing happened, and I made a comment about it in ... English, I think. Don't hold me to it. I think at this point, the mom started talking to me a little also. Oh! That's right, the girl eventually decided to share with her mother what was going on, and said something to her that I couldn't hear, presumably about how silly we were being. The mom, however, was a pretty nice lady, and she just smiled and laughed lightly. Soon, the three of us were talking, and we chatted for the next 20 minutes or so.

The only problem was, they didn't speak a lick of English. So I had to use my horrible Japanese to get by. But I did! We had a surprisingly in depth conversation, given that I've only studied Japanese one year, and it was obvious that if only our schedules were different, that girl and I would've met up again sometime in the near future.

Now the girl was already cute enough to warrant being satisfied with such an accomplishment, but the fact that I basically flirted my way through spoken Japanese was pretty awesome, I thought.

The unfortunate thing, though, was that we got off at the same sightseeing stop, the A-bomb dome, and although we weren't walking together, we walked awkwardly close to each other for the next 30 minutes or so. It was one of those situations where you actually had achieved closure in your dealings with a person, but then continued to be around them.

Perhaps you don't know what I mean. In my mind, especially in the context of travelling, but even outside it as well, there is a natural time for relationships to come to a close, or a natural feel for its closing. With many of the people I ran parallel with for a short time, we had a sort of tying off of loose ends, with or without the idea of ever running into each other again in the future, and left it at that. It wasn't that we didn't want to spend more time with each other then, but that we had come to a conclusion that had closure, at the very least, with a mature understanding of the fact that we were going to go our separate ways at some point in time, anyway.

Then there's those times when you don't have that. When you meet a person, have a great time, then for one reason or another, things fall through, and you don't see them again, or don't talk to them again. I have a bigger story coming up about this sort of thing soon, but basically, there are situations where, if only you could've been with this person just one more time, you would've felt that closure, and you (or perhaps I should just say I, as this might not apply to anyone else's mindsets) could move on feeling as though I've gotten the bare minimum I longed for out of my interactions with this person. This, in some part, is what happened with Celeste, that Canadian girl I hung out with in Kyoto and again in Osaka.

So with this girl and her mother, I had reached that natural end to our chapter, but we lingered in each other's periphery for half an hour afterwards, exchanging awkward "hello again!"'s and "goodbye again!"'s. Of course, there are much worse ways to have a bad time with people, but it did needlessly taint our otherwise solid little experience.

Other than that, here's a few pictures from the A-Bomb Dome and the Memorial Peace Park adjacent to it.

After my jaunt through the Peace Park, I beelined for the train station, hoping I could make it to Shimonoseki, my port of exit from Japan, quick enough to find a decent place to stay the night and still be able to relax a bit. I left at around 6pm, knowing that, for all intents and purposes, my stay in Japan had come to a close, as Shimonoseki has little charm to it, and little reason to go beyond taking the boat to Korea. This entry has already gotten pretty long, so I'll save my time in Shimonoseki for my next post, which will also include the ferry trip over to Korea.

See you next time! Sorry it's been so long.