I am writing tonight from my hotel room in Hiroshima. They have high speed Internet here, but “high speed” is probably not an accurate description. It’s not 2400 baud, but it’s not DSL either.
After my post last night, Beth and I went out with my sister and brother-in-law for a couple of hours, leaving the kids in the apartment. Before anyone calls child welfare services, I would point out that my sister’s kids were all sound asleep, and Joey (12) and Jessie (10) are more than capable of minding the store.
Our first stop was a pachinko and slot parlor. This is the closest thing to a casino in Japan. If you haven’t played pachinko, I’m not sure how to describe it. You shoot tiny balls up into a grid. As they fall, you hope they fall into a specific hole which activates a slot machine in the center. Theoretically, the slot machine hits some combination, and more balls fall out the bottom. Then you redeem the balls for money. I say “theoretically,” because we never did see it happen. We got the balls in the right hole several times, but the slots never paid off.
From there we walked a bit and ended up at a Korean Barbeque. Here, you order meat and/or vegetables and cook them on a grill in the center of the table. A few plates of meet and two draft Kirins, and I was good for the night.
Today, we caught the bullet train from Tokyo at 12:10pm. We purchased a 7-day Japan Rail pass, which, although cheaper than individual tickets, does not allow us to travel of the fastest “Nozomi” trains. Instead, we traveled on the “Hikari” trains. The difference was one transfer and about 40 minutes. The train left Tokyo on-time at 12:10 and, after a change in Osaka, we arrived in Hiroshima at 4:56.
We covered a distance of 423 miles in four hours and 46 minutes. St. Louis to Chicago is 260 miles or so. I checked Amtrak. Time from St. Louis to Chicago via train is a minimum of five hours and 20 minutes – and that’s with a 4:35am departure from St. Louis. So, we covered 163 more miles in 34 less minutes! That is the benefit of a bullet train.
The train was comfortable, but somewhat plain. The countryside seemed similar after a while, but houses did move farther apart as we got into the country. The train system was very easy to navigate. Signs and announcements were in English. The car number was posted on the platform, so that you could line up right where your car was going to be. We had assigned seats and had no trouble finding them.
Our hotel in Hiroshima is right at the train station, which we did for a quick exit tomorrow. It’s called the Hotel Granvia, and, although on the edge of the city, has a nice view of the downtown from our room on the 14th floor. We had dinner at a Benihana-like place where we got to cook our own food and took a quick walk towards the center of town before heading back here. Beth and I have been sleeping on very thin mats on the floor at my sister’s, so, as you can imagine, we are excited about having a real bed. The hotel also has a heated seat on the toilet. (What do you write after that?)
Tomorrow, we have a tour that will take us to Miyajima, which is an island shrine, and then to the Hiroshima Peace Museum. I anticipate the latter to be as impactful as the Holocaust Museum in D.C. (which hit me harder than the actual camps I visited in Poland).
