Spent today getting sunburnt and sore legs. We covered a lot of ground – first stop was Osaka Jo, a castle that has been built, destroyed and rebuilt many times. We ran out of time to take a look inside, but spent a few hours wandering through the gardens that surround it, quite a nice change of pace compared to Shinsaibashi.
After heading back to the hotel to retrieve our bags, it was time to leave Osaka and head to our next stop – Hiroshima. This involved our first trip on the Shinkansen (Bullet Train). Yes, they are everything they’re cracked up to be – perfectly on time (take note CityRail), spacious (take note Jetstar), and fast, covering over 300km in 90 minutes.
Hiroshima seems to be a much more ‘open’ city than Osaka (or at least the parts of it we saw). The streets are wider, the shops are bigger, and there’s much more greenery. A large part of this greenery is the Peace Park, which contains a plethora of memorials to the victims of the atomic bomb. The museum was closing by the time we arrived, but we’ll be heading back there in the next day or two.
We ended our day with another amazing meal (I’m beginning to get the impression that no matter where we eat the food will be great). Hiroshima’s speciality is Okonomiyaki, a type of Japanese pancake, and we dined in a building called Okonomi-mura (Okonomiyaki Village). There’s three floors of restuarants packed in, each one consisting of a few square meters of hotplate and chairs surrounding it. The Okonomiyaki is cooked to your specifications, and is left on the hotplate to keep warm as you break off pieces to eat. After a bad experience yesterday with hot-from-the-pan Takoyaki (fried octopus dumplings) which left me with a burnt tongue, I was suitably cautious tonight, but survived without further damage.
Tomorrow we’re planning to catch a ferry across to Miyajima, an island just off the coast. If our legs can handle it, we’ll be walking up Misen, a mountain on Miyajima. Or perhaps we’ll just take the cable car…
It seems you are finding your way around well in spite of the lack of street names. Have you had any luck finding English speaking residents when you need them? All the food sounds interesting, but do you know what all the ingredients are? I am looking forward to sampling some new dinner ideas when you return.
No- Don’t take the cable car! It’s an incredible walk. And you might see a monkey (not of 70s Japanese television fame…how awesome would that be). Just don’t touch them. Customs in Sydney tends to take note of you if you happen to disembark pale, sweaty and shivering.
Have you had a hot can of tea out of a vending machine yet?
Have fun and safe monkey watching.
PS- Sim….that is an awfully wide lens you’ve used to take that shot. I like!
PPS- Sorry Holly. Yes…we are talking lenses on your blog.