Long Time No Blog

So, as you all might have noticed, there hasn’t been a blog update in, well, quite a while. That is part busyness, part absence, and part laziness. Lots of stuff has happened, so I will just have to summarize and leave pictures to look at. Before the winter vacation started, I went to one of   my elementary school’s festivals that the first and second graders put on.  They wore little fall outfits, played some music on random instruments and ran booths and games. I think that the festival was put on for all the old people in the town, because the students’ grandparents were all there and that’s about it. When I walked in I was given money (fake paper money of course) and told I could spend it on whatever I wanted. So after listening to the  concert, everyone was let loose. They had several games including pinecone bowling, and hoop throwing (whatever you are able to throw a hoop around is yours), lots of food options (popcorn seemed to be the favorite), and little crafts that the kids had made for sale. So that  was  a pretty fun event, and I got to go during work hours so that’s cool too.

Anyway, then there was the first snowfall in Kubokawa. Marisa and I went out to the crazy flavored ice cream place that night which is where we came to have our snow pictures here. While that was the first and the snow from that time didn’t really last, it wasn’t the last time either. It was snowing the day I left for America for Christmas. You heard right, I was home for Christmas, and it was great. My travel itinerary was kind of complicated, switching trains, booking hotels, getting flights cancelled and not just planes changed, but airports changed, both on to and from, but I ended up getting there and back without too much trouble. I will save the Christmas pictures for a separate post right after this.

Because of the times of my flights leaving and coming, I had to actually stay the night the day before I flew out of Japan and the night I flew back to Japan in a hotel next to the airport. So, since I flew out of Hiroshima, I got a chance to go around that place. It was a good  city. And I was proud of myself because I hadn’t looked up how to get to any of the places that I wanted to see there before actually going, so I had to find my way around this impossibly big train station that has multiple underground tunnels and stuff that pop up on all sides of different streets around the station, and then find the bus station, street car station, and which stops I needed to get off on. So the day before I left I was able to visit the atomic bomb dome, and the peace memorial museum, which was kind of intense I might add. They had display with a red glowing background of burnt buildings and these wax figurines that were eerily real looking with their arms reaching out and their skin melting off their bodies and bone and other stuff showing through. Then they had pictures that children who had survived for a little while after had drawn of people with skin falling off their bodies, and bodies littering the streets, and people screaming for water.

There were a lot of school kids there, from like middle school or  something, and then there was me, an American wandering around the place by myself. It was kind of weird, but I didn’t get any more than the usual amount of stares. At the atomic bomb dome I  saw quite a few foreigners that looked like tourists that had stopped in the city for a few days.

Then when I flew back from America I had most of the next day in the city since my train didn’t leave until later in the evening. So I went to the island Miyajima and to the really famous  shrine there. I had always seen pictures of it, and finally got to go. It was really cool. And I didn’t know how to get there before I was actually in the city either, and found my way just fine, took the train to the ferry which got me to the island. Everything was  surprisingly cheap after being on Shikoku, where transportation is more expensive because there isn’t a whole lot of it. So here are pictures of that here.