おはよう

So I took two shinkansen trains to Hiroshima. The first one took me to Osaka and then I transferred to another shinkansen from there. Also I had to take a regular train from Okazaki to Mikawaanjo before I could take the first shinkansen train. Also worth noting the lack of escalator in this Mikawaanjo. My suitcase was really heavy as I only had one and my backpack keeping me going for these past 3 months. It was a huge pain dragging them around but it was necessary. My suitcase seemed to just barely fit on the upper storage areas on the shinkansen trains. Of course it took all my strength to lift that thing that high. Leaving Okazaki at 5:17, I reached Hiroshima around 8:40.

I did successfully meet my friend at the station and then from there we had to take a bus to get to the hostel. He picked the hostel as he had already stayed there for one night. Let’s just say this place was a bit out of the way. After departing from a 25 minute bus ride, we had to go up a massive hill to this picturesque hostel overlooking many parts of the city. It looked very nice for sure and it was the cheapest place I stayed at during the whole trip. But it was a pain lugging a suitcase up that hill and from the bus. If it didn’t have wheels, I would have been screwed. Fortunately our trip didn’t start with rain, that came later.

This hostel had a curfew so that night we didn’t do much more than hit up a konbeni(convenience store) and get some junk food as there weren’t as restaurants or supermarkets open after 10pm. Everything in Japan opens somewhat late and closes early(though they have better standards for service than anywhere else). The hostel room had 6 beds though only one other person besides us was there. This is off season I suppose. It was nice talking to the reception desk girl in a mixture of japanese and english(the mix being my new preferred language). Japanese service attendants and any person of that sort tend to use English(bad English often) to help foreigners. They pretty much don’t expect foreigners to speak any Japanese so at various times through the journey, people who insisted on using bad English despite the fact that I could understand them better in Japanese, it was frustrating. The great thing about Okazaki is that no one speaks English there as it’s a small town.


The next day we saw the mandatory sights such as peace park and the museum. Afterwards found a 5 story okonomiyaki place where every floor had 4 or 5 different small grill setups all selling okonomiyaki. We picked a random one and it was good. Hiroshima has its own type of Okonomiyaki and it was pretty good. It was layered with egg and noodles. Look up okonomiyaki if you’ve never had it before, it’s awesome and not hard to make.

After this we went back and got our stuff and moved out and headed to Okayama. This was in the same day but I’ll have to save that for the next blog. Enjoy the pics.

またね