Hiroshima

Here we go! This is when I hit up Hiroshima towards the end of 2011. We caught a shinkansen from Osaka straight to Hiroshima and pretty much spent the whole train ride playing Flight Control on the iPad. I'm also going to keep shit nice and short now because I closed the window accidentally and the shit didn't save!


The view from our room, about 10 minutes from Hiroshima JR Station by tram, that's right I said tram. The only time in Japan I saw a tram and it seemed to be a popular way to get around Hiroshima.


Our room, this is pretty much what all our rooms in Japan looked like.


Our first order of business was to head to the Hiroshima Peace Park to check out the A-Bomb Dome, the Peace Memorial and the museum. Being around here gave us this eerie feeling, just knowing that such a horrible event happened here just over 60 years ago.


This is the Children's Peach Memorial, it helped lighten the mood a bit. All those cabinets contained paper cranes folded mainly by students and schools from all over the world and it gets collected and put on display here. It's quite inspiring to see them come from so many places, we spotted one from Australia too.


This is the Peace Memorial and when you look down the middle you see the A-Bomb Dome.


We then headed inside the Museum and it was really moving to learn so much. This is pretty much the only photo I took while inside because I was just too wrapped up with everything that was on display. So much information and some scary displays kept me busy. It's quite sad to see how much people suffered but it was quite educational and I learnt quite a bit too.


When the museum closed we headed out exploring to find some food. Japan is always filled with these long walk way type of things that are littered with cool stores and restaurants.


We spotted this but decided we wanted something else tonight haha.


After a bit of walking around we found this cool little ramen store in one of the side streets.


Always happy to get some nice ramen in my stomach after a long cold day of walking around.


After dinner we kept wandering the streets and stumbled upon this cool little toy store, this thing caught my eye straight away. The LEGO display was quite impressive.


I spotted this cool quad bike that I've never seen before.


This caught my attention straight away because I remember having this set when I was younger. This store had quite a few old sets for sale, both second hand and brand new in the box too.


Not only did it have a lot of LEGO it had even more ChoroQ toys!


I wanted this set so bad but it was way out of my price range.


Real Gimmicks! I walked away picking up a CRX and a Takata NSX ChoroQ to add to my collection.


On the way home we stopped by the arcades as usual and I tried my hand at this game that I've seen quite a few times. You pretty much just flip the table and try and cause as much damage as you can. Pretty much my first and last time playing it, I'd rather save my 100 yen coins for darts!


I made sure I rocked these at every hotel we went to, so comfortable until it ends up strangling you through the night haha.


Waiting for the tram to take us to the station for our new adventure today, something a bit more uplifting than yesterday.


We were all smiles because we were heading to...


The Mazda Museum! Woot woot! Because we didn't have wifi in our hotel room we got information from a brochure and it said there was a tour starting in the afternoon at 1:30pm, what we didn't know was that this tour was in Japanese and there was an earlier tour at 10:30am in English. This didn't really bother us because we were just happy to be there.


Checking out the Mazda Shinari concept, a very nice looking car.


Decided to get some quick games on the PS2 to kill a bit of time before the tour started.


When it was about to start we got our passes and jumped on a bus which took us from the main building to the museum. From this point we weren't allowed to take photos but the Mazda plant is massive!


When we got to the museum we got to start taking photos again. Here's a very clean Mazda Familia.


Mine and Kim's favourite car on display, in green too! This thing was so clean!


The Mazda AZ-1 is definitely a unique car.


The famous Mazda Cosmo.


The even more famous Mazda 787B. While the tour guides were explaining it to the other people in our tour group I was giving my own tour to Kim in English and mentioning some things that the tour guides didn't mention too! I think I should get a job here haha.


This is a very cool painting of the 787B right next to the real thing. I would love to have this hanging on my wall.


Quad rotor! The power plant of the 787B.


This made things a lot easier to explain to Kim how a rotary engine works. Again while the tour was going on in Japanese I was translating and explaining things my own way for Kim to understand.


This is us at the end of our tour, the final part of the tour was the production line were photos were banned which is a bummer because it was the best part of the whole tour. It was so cool to see all the cars being put together, I thought about sneaking in a couple of shots but I didn't want to get kicked out because the tour group was pretty small. The tour guides were really cool too because they came up to us afterwards and asked if we understood and I told them I knew some of the info already but we thoroughly enjoyed it. I met this cool guy on the tour too, it was his 3rd or 4th time taking the tour and is a huge Mazda fan. He was explaining things to this Japanese girl the whole trip that I think the tour guides didn't even know haha.


Good bye Mazda Museum! It's definitely worth checking out, the tour is free as well and the staff are really friendly. I'm not even a huge Mazda fan and I enjoyed myself very much and so did Kim, she loved every bit of the tour even though she didn't understand everything.


Back at Hiroshima JR Station we picked up these maple leaf-shaped sweets which contained different fillings and they were delicious. They are the omiyage of Hiroshima, I'm not sure if I mentioned this before but each big city has their own specialty sweet and this one is Hiroshima's one. I got a box to take away to give as a gift as well, they were so yum!


As always we always enjoy hitting up Japan's arcades because they shit all over the ones in Australia, so much variety and so much fun even though half the time we didn't know what we were meant to do haha.


For dinner we decided to wing it and try something new, we found this place and it's special was this. It's served cold and you dip it in the soup and eat it - well that's what we saw people doing and we just copied. It's a bit weird at first but I got used to it, Kim on the other hand had a whole different experience with this haha. Her stomach didn't like it very much by the end of the night, let's just leave it at that.


I spotted this very cool looking tourism poster for Hiroshima.


Our last trip to Hiroshima station as we would be heading off after this.


Outside the station is this water feature which we called the 'chrome balls' - which you would have done the same too!


Grrrr! We wanted our okonomiyaki since Hiroshima is famous for its okonomiyaki.


Here's my one, I got the mixed one with oysters, which is another specialty in Hiroshima. It was delicious! There were so many restaurants around the station which offered okonomiyaki and this place didn't disappoint. They were just as good as the ones we go a couple of days before.


Kim's one, she doesn't like oysters so she just got one with meat instead. We also sat across a very cute old couple who made small talk with us during our meal and it was great. I love how they were so friendly and not shy like a lot of other Japanese and they assumed I was Japanese too since they straight up started asking me things in Japanese like it was nothing. It was a great start to our day and a great memory to leave Hiroshima with. This was it, our first time in Hiroshima and it was great, a nice contrast between cultural activities as well as car related ones too. There was also this restaurant across from our hotel which specialised in eel but every time we went they were either closed or not opened for business yet! It just gives us another reason to come back here.

Next I head back to my home away from home - Gifu, to spend time with some close friends over Christmas. More on that post soon! The photos are done I just need to find time to write up a post about it. Let's just hope it doesn't take as longs as this one did. Thanks for reading, I always enjoy writing these posts as I get to relive all the great memories from Japan again so I hope you guys enjoy them just as much!