What's going on with me?

Kyoto, Kyoto desu... We went back to Kyoto to see more of the palace in the sun and to check out an area that supposedly had some cool streets and a large park prime for cherry blossom viewing. We’re here a bit early to see many blossoms, but there have been some, so we figured we’d give it a shot. We first went up to the Imperial Palace again to try to get a few more pictures in the better light. While there we decided to go check out the Golden Temple which gave us a chance to try out the bus. So COOL! Buses in foreign countries are always fun, and while challenging offer a great way to see a city. The buses here proved to be pretty easy, with a flat fare to ride and several stops clearly marked along the way. When we got to the shrine we found ourselves at the most touristy part of our trip to date and shuffled into the crowd. To me, the gardens and landscaping were more impressive than the shrine itself... there was a woman hand-grooming the moss on the ground. We ended our day at ...

We saved Tuesday for Hiroshima, a city we both were very interested in getting to, and headed down in the morning via the Shinkansen. This was poor choice #2 as we ended up on another Kodoma and cost ourselves some sightseeing time. But once we did get to Hiroshima, wow, what an amazing experience. We found our way to Peace Park, the location of the A-Bomb dome. This dome was left standing after the bomb was dropped and a park has been built around it to educate and memorialize this eerie landmark. There are also memorials made up of a) a flame that is supposedly from the original fire, kept burning over the years, and b) a mound of ashes, built up with the remains of people lost in the bombings. To say this is a sobering experience would be a gross understatement. Sadly, there were as always tourists posing for cheeky photos of these monuments and I was surprised to see Asians doing the posing at a spot I’d imagined would be quite serious for them. Then they started speaking English ...

Nick checked in the tour guide and discovered that our hotel had a ‘restaurant-row’ attached to it, which was accessed through the basement levels. We headed down to B1 and found what amounted to an underground city, with tunnels to the subway and a series of restaurants and shops, most notably the mini-complex called HiHi Town. This place became an oasis for us. And Monday was our first stop when we hit it for lunch. All I can say is if we hadn’t found HiHi Town we would have had a much less positive experience in Osaka. But through HiHi Town we found an Udon/Soba place that had fantastic lunch, with noodle bowls, rice, small sushi rolls, etc. It was fantastic. Kyoto desu... We then made our first trip to Kyoto which proved to be a very cool town. It’s only about a 15 minute ride on the Shinkansen so we went up after lunch which got us there at around 2pm. There’s a tall pagoda within view of the train coming in, so that seemed like the best place to start our exploration. We walked o...

Our Shinkansen passes went into effect as we traveled from Tokyo to Osaka, which would serve as our base of operations for the next few days. The Shinkansen is amazing, a super-fast train that reaches speeds of 170MPH+ and runs on-time as a near guarantee. The cars are comfortable and the stations are extremely convenient with a wide range of restaurants to grab lunch before boarding. There are three levels of Shinkansen: Nozomi, Hikari, and Kodama. Nozomi is the most express and Kodama the least. Nozomi is not available with our rail passes, so we learned the hard way that Hikari is the way to go. The Kodama is essentially a regional train and takes SIGNIFICANTLY more time than a Hikari train running the same route. Sadly, we learned this fact after two trips on the Kodama and while we didn’t lose an insane amount of time, we did spend a bit more of our trip on a train than we’d expected to. We did get to see Mt. Fuji at a distance though and it’s amazing in person. We didn’t plan a t...

Saturday was a biggie, with at least four different stops across the city. 1) American Breakfast: After our experience with that unidentifiable piece of pork anatomy from Friday night, we decided to start our day with our hotel’s offering for breakfast. Nothing incredible unusual to report, although they did include a lovely garden salad with our eggs, bacon, and toast, which was a nice addition to the nutritional value of our day’s start. Atta! 2) Ueno Park: The cherry blossoms weren’t in full effect yet but it didn’t take away from the park at all. This seems to be like the ‘Central Park’ of Tokyo, although there are so many parks around it’s hard to say. It houses the Zoo, a Science Museum, and the Tokyo National Museum, so it’s a biggie. We wandered around a few temples and shrines and watched a few kids play baseball at a community park. One of the kids had a cannon for an arm, but sadly lacked control and almost took the head off his friend. I was glad to see that this is cultu...

The USA vs. Japan digestion tournament was being played skillfully by the Americans... until tonight when Japan substituted a late roster addition to the game. The as yet unidentified player came on strong and brought its 'A' game, putting a hard hit on USA's team and then vanished into the night, apparently unavailable or unwilling to comment. A bystander captured this photo of this yet-to-be-named powerhouse and ANY information in the effort to identify it before any further damage can be done is welcome. If you or anyone you know has information leading to a positive ID please send comments ASAP so that the appropriate digestive aids can be taken immediately.