April 19, 2014

April 19, 2014

When I woke up we weren't in the joint. We were in the New Wakasa hotel room. The breakfast luckily didn't have any fish heads on my meal. The breakfast was pretty good. My favorite part was miso soup. We wandered around Nara for a while. We went to a cool temple where there were lanterns everywhere. There were 3000 plus stone and copper lanterns leading up to the Kasuga Shrine. We saw some pagodas. The top level meant Sky, the second level was Air and Wind, the third was Wood, the fourth was Water, the fifth was Earth. Today we also saw a lot of deer and cool ponds. There was a screaming girl at one of the ponds we went to.

Then we headed back to the hotel and grabbed our luggage and headed to the train station. We took a 40 minute train to Kyoto. We took an earlier train so we could look for my favorite candy (it is only made in Kyoto) and conveyor belt sushi. Surprisingly we found both right next to each other. I was so happy! I got one of every flavor. The conveyor belt sushi was also good. It was so cheap and good. We sat at the bar so that we could take off the sushi we wanted. After all that, we headed to the bullet train station where we could wait for our train to Hiroshima.

We arrived at Hiroshima. We first dropped our bags off at the hotel and then went to the Peace Memorial Park. At the Peace Memorial Park there was a arch that is in memory of the bomb victims. There was also The Flame of Peace where if all the nuclear weapons were destroyed the flame would go out. But now it has been going for about 50 years. There was the Children's Peace Monument. This girl was sick from the bomb.She thought if she made a 1000 paper cranes that she would be healed. But she died. In memory of her kids still make paper cranes around the world and bring them there. I saw cases of the paper cranes. Then we went to the A Bomb Dome. It was one of the only structures that wasn't evaporated from the A Bomb. The dome on the building was covered with copper. The copper was melted but the skeleton of the dome was still there. We also saw the Peace Bell. I rang the bell. The Memorial Mound was all the ashes of tens of thousands of victims it was near the Peace Bell.

The Memorial made me feel sad. But it also made me think that if the bomb hadn't gone off I probably wouldn't have been here because my great grandfather had gotten sent over to Japan but when he got here the war was over.

We went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. it was good. Me and my dad got the same thing, same appetizer and same entree. My mom almost got the same thing as al of us. When we walked home I was so feeling ice cream. I had to find some soft serve! But all we could find was pre made soft serve. So I just got some Hagen Daz cookies and cream ice cream.