Southern Japan Sojourn

For the last week we have been touring Japan. We bought the Seishun Ju-Hachi ticket which allows you to ride the trains all day at a cheap price for 5 days of your choice. The catch is that the trains must be local, so that means they are really slow. We spent 3 days, from 6am to 10pm, just riding trains!! So we took along books to read, games to play, and movies to watch!



We had a little set back in our plans...Travis had to make a surprise visit to the ER the first day we arrived in Tokyo! We and the doctors, both in Japan and America :), think he had a kidney stone--Ouch!! "Yes, please everyone be sure to drink lots of water," pleas Travis. "You never never ever want to feel that much pain!" It was a little scary, but we trusted that the Lord would get him through it. Five hours later we were out of the hospital and on our way.

At the time Travis went into the ER, we were to meet up with one of Travis' high school pals. Obviously that didn't work out, but we were able to meet up for dinner at Outback Steakhouse where we ravishly ate our little Japanese tummies full-up. It was quite a once in a lifetime chance to meet our friends while IN Japan!!

The following day we spent in Osaka. We were able to see some old famous temples, and we went to see the city castle. As you can see in the picture, they didn't mess around when it came to castle building. The picture below is not the castle, but the huger than huge castle wall and moat.

And here is the castle! Huge isn't it! 8 floors! Obviously this is not the original; the Japanese had a thing about burning castles when they took over the city and it also was destroyed in WWII. But they fully restored it and what a sight! Inside is a museum of the castle history and artifacts from the castle and leaders of the clans that ruled it. It was quite interesting.

Of course, we went for the skyline view at the Floating Garden Observatory (not really a garden?). It was an interesting building and an amazing view! But we decided that we don't like Osaka very much :(. Sorry friends from Osaka...but that city is kind of dirty and crazily full of buildings. As you can see in the picture, as far as the eye can see are buildings, execpt of course the mountains. We felt that this town was more confusing than Tokyo, which is hard to believe.

The next day we visited Hiroshima. Now this city is very beautiful! It has many large parks, trees, an easy street car system, and of course many extremely famous places. Our first stop was the A-Bomb Dome. We don't think we can really explain this in words, but it was saddening and really touched the heart.

The Peace Park area has many many memorials and monuments dedicated to people who died in the bombing or gave their lives to helping the suffering people. The picture below is a monument to all those who died that infamous day. Under the dome is a grave with all the names of those who died. Beyond the dome is the eternal flame of peace that will be extinguished when all nuclear bombs have been destroyed. And just beyond that is the A-Bomb Dome, a standing reminder of the utter destruction of these bombs.

In the musuem are many artifacts, pictures, and stories of the destruction of that bombing. The stories are sickening and painful to read. The pictures below are a scale model of the city before and after the bombing. 140,000 people lost their lives from just this one bomb. It is interesting to note that today's hydrogen bomb is 1,000 times more powerful than the A-bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

In the evening of that day in Hiroshima, we went to visit Miyajima. This is one of the three most beautiful views of Japan, which means that we have seen two out of three of the best Japan views (check out our blog of our visit to Matsushima from our first year in Japan). Miyajima is an island which was held as sacred in the past. Nobody could step foot on the island so they built a temple on the beach on stilts. They had to reach the temple by going through a huge red tori (gate) in the water.

Now a days, it is more of a tourist trap, but it is still quite beautiful. The deer on the island are quite tame and even though you are not to feed or touch them, it is rather difficult to avoid a tame, hungry deer that can smell the food in your bag or that wants to take a bite of your shirt. Here is a picture of Angie trying to "avoid" one of these "pets."

And here is the beautiful view of the "floating" tori (its not really floating, but appears to be). It is really cool to see, but we found that God's creation around the island: mountains, sea, sunset, etc; were much more inspiring. We would have loved to take more pictures of this famous sight, but once the tide went out, people thought that it would be cooler to walk out under the tori to take pictures, which obviously ruined everybody else's pictures of the view.

We headed back to town, Miyajima is a ways out of town, and took one more walk by the A-Bomb dome and some of the other monuments. At night the dome has an eery green glow from the lighting that is visible only in pictures, which makes for a very beautiful scene.

Wednesday was Angie's 25th birthday!!!!!! So we celebrated American style with Starbucks for breakfast, Subway for lunch, and TGIFridays for dinner. We met up with our friend Saori in the afternoon to hang out. She took us on a boat cruise through Yokohama bay! Then we headed to TGIF for dinner. It has been Saori and our tradition to eat TGIF for our birthdays, but this time we ate ON Angie's birthday! We had a blast!!!