Hiroshima

Notice: I had decided to add some advertisements to the blog so that I could potentially earn a little bit of money from it. I added it last night and everything looked good, but unfortunately while I was sleeping it seems some malware got through instead. Upon waking up and realizing what happened I immediately removed the ads, but if you viewed the blog between the hours of 11am-7pm on Thursday April 13 and you received a scary looking pop up that said it was uploading your credit card information- please take this seriously and monitor your credit cards. I myself did have one of my credit cards hacked and it already had several fraudulent charges on it. I'm so sorry that this happened. I feel terrible that I put everyone at risk. I have contacted my advertising platform, PropellerAds, for what support they can provide. I am waiting to hear back and I will keep you all updated on that. The blog is back to being ad-free (and safe!) now and I will let you know in advance if that will change in the future.

Today had a rough start for us. First of all there was the whole malware thing to deal with (again, I'm so sorry about that!). Please let me know (via email) if your information was hacked as well so that I have that information. I feel terrible and I can't believe that this happened less than 3 hours after I decided to add ads to the blog.

Then Matt wasn't feeling well and didn't sleep well. We're hoping it's allergies and not a cold, but it's never fun to feel all icky.

So we were in rather low spirits as we packed up and checked out of our airbnb. We headed to the train station and got tickets to head to Hiroshima. Well, kind of. The reserved seats for our second leg were all sold out, so they told us to try to get seats in the unreserved section and best of luck. As soon as we got on it was apparent that there were no seats available, so we stood in the hallway for the first half hour. Then at the next stop I sniped some seats from people getting off, so the next hour we had seats at least.

And we arrived in Hiroshima! We were walking out of the station when I spotted a bakery and I was starting to get hungry so we made a pit stop there for some snacks. One of the things we got was a cheesy roll thing which was absolutely delicious. It was just stuffed with cheese inside and it was super hot like it just came out of the oven. That helped to turn our day around a bit!

We walked to our airbnb which is more like a mini hostel area. We were able to get in and drop our bags off but not check in yet, so I'll say more about that later.

Then we walked to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. This was sad (as one might expect). First we saw the A-bomb dome, which is the remains of a building that was partially left standing which was preserved as a memorial of the bombing and a reminder of the horrors of using a nuclear weapon. It was a registered on the World Heritage List in 1996. 

Then we saw the Memorial Tower to the Mobilized Students and the Children's Peace Monument; those were tear jerkers. The monument was funded by fund-raising campaign by Japanese schoolchildren, including Sadako Sasaki's classmates. Sadako was a young girl who died of leukemia from the radiation of the bomb.

Then we saw the Memorial Cenotaph for the A-bomb victims. This is a saddle-shaped monument that covers a cenotaph which contains the names of the people killed by the bomb. The arch shape represents a shelter for the sounds of the victims, and it frames the Peace Flame and A-bomb dome. The Peace Flame has been burning continuously since it was lit in 1964 and it will remained lit until all of the nuclear bombs on the planet are destroyed.

We also checked out the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which was pretty graphic. It had a lot of artifacts from the day of the bombing so that you could see the damage. It also had lots of pictures and replicas of people and their injuries- I won't go into more details. It was informative but also pretty upsetting. It's hard not to get emotional when seeing that kind of pain and suffering.

Throughout visiting the monuments I wondered if the Japanese people there looked at me and felt the same way that I had when I saw them at Pearl Harbor six months ago. I had been angry at what their country had done to mine and wondered why they were even there. But today definitely gave me the other perspective and I understand better why they were there and wanted to pay their respects. I think it's good that we're all reminded about the terrible things we've done and the consequences so that hopefully nobody ever decides they have to go to that extreme again. But I'll get off this topic; it could be a dedicated blog series all on its own.

After leaving the museum we strolled back through the Peace Memorial Park towards the river and found a sunny place to sit down and relax for a bit. It was an absolutely gorgeous day; about 70 degrees, slight breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. So we enjoyed an hour of the evening sun before going to find a place for dinner. We ended up picking a sushi place, since we were hoping for something healthy and relatively cheap. It was pretty good but ended up being a little more expensive than we thought, we're still not sure how that happened.

Then we got back to our airbnb. It's similar to a capsule hotel in that they have sleep rooms with just little individual capsules that you sleep in. There are several other travelers here as well but everyone has mostly kept to themselves. But the place is nice and clean, so I'll report tomorrow on how sleeping in a capsule goes!