はじめまして- 留学生の冒険談: MIyajima

After a very emotional day at the Hiroshima Peace Park, my travel buddies and I decided it was time to eat. And eat we did! We found an adorable little cafe that was half open-faced, serving all kinds of amazing french toasts varieties. I almost caved to the fruit and ice cream french toast but I'm far happier with the salad and chicken variety set I ordered. It. Was. Amazing. I wanted to eat solely at amazing little cafes like that after eating there...

We adventured around Hiroshima's downtown district, mostly window shopping until our desire to consume okonomiyaki won out. My strange request for a vegetable, cheese, and egg only okonomiyaki confused our poor waitress and chef so much that when we were served he proudly pronounced the name of each before he placed my friends' delicious meat/seafood varieties in front of them, before pausing and placing mine in front of me. "これは。。。チスです。。。" (And this is...the cheese one) *pause* "It's a very hotto." As if he needed to add something to make it better for me. It gave us a great laugh :) And it was FANTASTIC. Absolutely amazing.

After dinner we realized it was kind of getting late but we found a massive Don Quijote and I couldn't resist the urge to introduce Alice and Sherie to the awesome low price shopping possibilities, so we made a quick stop before catching the last bus to Hiroshima Station. Where we discovered that the coin lockers are only available from 9 AM until 9 PM meaning...all of my clothing/toiletries/and Alice's toiletries/towel were locked away until 9 AM. Oh well. We appreciated our 7 minute allotment of water at the youth hostel that much more the following day.

Ok. So the directions on the youth hostel combined with Japanese maps (which are famous for making things look SO much farther apart than they actually are) meant that we went for a near 11 PM adventure stroll in the middle of a pitch black town before deciding to look behind the actual hotel for the the hostel. And lo and behold, thur she stood. With her staff members thankfully drinking their faces off ... if they hadn't we wouldn't have been able to check in. Some of our classmates were scammed out of their money by a fake hostel, so I'm grateful that ours was actually there, but it wasn't exactly what the pictures or reviews led you to believe. We were invited to go clubbing the following night with the staff members...yeah...

But the following day totally made up for the hostel, and really, I was just happy to have a place to sleep. After retrieving our items from the clutches of the coin locker, we happily went back to shower and go by ferry across the bay to Miyajima Island. Which is so beautiful. It's mountainous, full of shika - spotted deer - begging for food, the weather was absolutely perfect. We went into a museum/temple that I could have stayed at all day long after having breakfast in this adorable family owned tea room/restaurant, stopped for tea time ice cream, then made our way into the famous seaside temple where we took so many pictures with each other, of each other, for other people, of other people, of the Tori (gate in the sea), of the temple...so many pictures...

We ended our stay in Hiroshima by having dinner just outside the station and going back to the downtown area, and napping before catching our lovely Willer Express bus back to Kyoto. It was an amazing weekend!!