Golden Week globetrotting. And by globetrotting I'm pretty much suggesting that to comb all of Hiroshima and its surrounding areas is akin to globetrotting. No matter. Hiroshima is big enough to exhaust a good 5 days and I live to tell the tale (after a close call with some crazy eyed monkeys and a karaoke binge that would leave Bukowski comatose). Below please find the play by play which isn't probably of considerable interest to anyone other than my super BFF Jason who braved monkeys and 4 hour marathon promenades with me, and my mother, who loves this kind of shit.
Okay, okay. Here we go! Vamanos!
Sunday: I take the shinkansen to Osaka early with the hopes of meeting up with training buddy extraordinaire Daniel. So we make active use of our keitais to find one another at shin-osaka, with a transcript that went a little something like this: "Hula: I'm at Central Gate. Da
niel: I'm at Central Gate". funny, as in funny ha, ha, ho, hee, Daniel and I were at different train stations. For shame. Terrified I'd get further lost in Osaka I jumped on the next JR train to Kansai airport, thinking I'd arrive all kinds of early, browse about and eat frozen yogurt at that stand I took a liking to when I first arrived. Well it took some time longer than I anticipated so by the time I arrived at the airport, sumimasen'ed a few airport personnel I realized Jason had already landed. I ran to the rendevoux area and was immediately accosted by a Japanese television station. Big cameras. Lots of lights. Boom mics and me looking totally bewildered and still without my voice from last week's sickness.
Okay. this is where the week starts getting interesting. So this show, "music edge, osaka style" asks me if they can interview me. I've nothing to do but wait so I oblige. they're more interested in who I'm waiting for and proceed to make impromptu posters and scream "jason" to anyone exiting the arrival gates. so Jason and I are interviewed in full by a very emphatic host so then asks us for our memory song. Uh.. we don't have a memory song. So after Jason offers up a Pixies tune and I a Guided By voices song, they practically spoon feed us lines and tell us our memory song is "Fragile" by Sting. Sure. Why not? Who doesn't love them some Sting at akward moments in Osaka.
Monday: My manager and his wife took us to a Hiroshima Carps baseball game! Ohhh doctor, I've never seen fans of this caliber. There were organized cheers and noise makers galore and bandstands. Such a time. I'd like to argue that I memorized the cheers, but really I just followed the phonetic sounds of the carps clad kids next to me. No worries, as the Carps kicked some serious but and won by a lot. A lot roughly equates to 4 runs, but I'll take what I can get. I'm a serious Carps fan now. Fair weather and all.
Jason and I ran about the city some that night and hit a few of the foreign bars that we'd rehit repeatedly throughout the week. My favorite being Molly Malone's an unassuming Irish Bar with fantastic western toilets. I gauge my hot spots based on my ability to urinate as I would at home. I think it a good caliber of measurement.
Tuesday: Ahhh... we scaled some mountainous structure. It was bea-u-tiful. Our walking map referred to it as the Promenade of Culture but by the end we had other words for it. Promenade of hurt calves, promenade of exhaustion. Well worth it though. I've never seen anything like it. After our newfound acquistion of ashthma we hit up Hiroshima castle and a Chinese Garden. All lovely. All well worth the hike(s). After which I'm fairly certain we hit more foreign bars. That seemed to be the theme to end each evening.
Wed
nesday: Sad, somber day. A bomb dome and museum. They were preparing for the flower fest that weekend, so the park was lovely and a-bustle. More nightlife in Hiro to follow.
Thursday: Flower festival! Some one million people flocked Peace Boulevard for some of the more memorible parade floats and walking processions I've ever seen. After which they had a peace lighting cere
mony in Peace Park. We created candles to commemorate and they lit up the entire park in the evening for a lovely, yet somber festival end. Unfortunately something became of Jason's candle. Gone. He must hate peace, as I LOVE peace and mine was standing tall and proud. No matter. It was a site to see.
Friday: Miyajima! My most favorite place in the entire world (save Walt Disney World, but come on- I'm programmed to say that). Deers everywhere. Our Hiro guide map warned us not to lose our ferry tickets to a deer and we laughed at the possibility. Nope. That is most certainly an option. We think they may have been animatronic or sedated as they let kids tug on them and basically ride them without so much as moving. We took a rope way across Mt Misen because I apparently ahve a newfound affinity for rope way gondola type things. We were some 500 or so meters in the air in a cab that held 30 plus Japanese tourists heading toward the monkey district. So I obviously discarded my newfound sense of adventuer and silently freaked out. This was captured in film. Repeatedly. Miyajima was the best. So picturesque and crafty. I bought my keitai charm there. An orange Disney thing that said Hiroshima. It must have been made for me as I LOVE orange and have a concerning obsession for all things Disney. I also adore Hiroshima, so I splurged for the disney charm. We also ate the best meal I've yet had in Japan there, at a small authentic restaurant that catered to our obnoxious vegetarianism. I don't know if I've ever taken in as much food as then, but it was well worth it. Good. Great. Now we're cooking with gas.
Saturday: Yuki! Oh, Yuki! You screwed me. This is supposedly the site of some infamous hot springs and onsens that must be mystical as we couldn't find them. We traipsed about Yuki which is a small, no, make that tiny, back woods town about an hour bus ride away from the furthest point in Hiroshima. It was pretty harrowing riding the bus as it seemed to go anywhere but where we wanted to go. Yuki did redeem itself though. Right as we were waiting for the next bus we spotted a band of monkeys. The crazy kind that you don't want to look in the eye. I got spazzy and freaked out, thinking the monkeys wanted my Yuki Onsen cookies I bought to bring back to my school and started running for cover. Funny, as the area I ran toward had only a brick wall for salvation. funny, maybe funnier that the only way out was to run toward the monkeys. Jason took a slew of action shots of me running in circles screaming for help that I haven't yet mastered in Japanese. In the end i was able to escape free of monkey sc
ar.
Sunday: Rest, rest, rest as we ran about the city non-stop for an entire week. We went in search of Okonomiyaki (a famous pancake type conglomeration in Hiroshima) but were foiled when we eneded up again in Molly Malones and then off to some sweet, sweet karaoke. Something happened, and I don't know how, where our karaoke marathon session cost a cool 10700 or so yen. Oops. Thankfully Big Echo takes major credit cards. I'll make sure to do a bittle more research before I respond in kind with Hei to everything.
Monday: I saw Jason off, took the shinkansen back and feel as though I need another good week to recover.
Sigh, oh, sigh. Gotta love Golden Week.
... limbers on, and falls tender down. Ankles splay and dull tide. The gymnist, long has arrived...
