Haha, Penis-logo!

The idea all along was to travel around Japan and see some of the sights, so I took the tip of a german backpacker I met in the capsule hotel and took an overnight bus all the way down to Hiroshima.

Talk about information being sparse in English.Nothing was announced in any language but Japanese. I got a little flier with the ground rules in English (no smoking on board etc etc) and that was it. But it was a bus ride. What can go wrong, right? Ok, I made that sound ominous on purpose, but it’s actually true. Nothing went wrong. Just sit back and enjoy the cheapest way of getting to Hiroshima.

Maybe “enjoy” is a bit of a strong word, but I actually managed to sleep through most of it. It just wasn’t nice sleep. It was the kind of sleep you have when you’re homeless and people spit on you. But sleep none the less. he bus stopped every 2-3 hours at rest stops that looked like carbon copies of eachother. I thought we had gone back when we got to the second one.

A-bomb dome

In Hiroshima I spent the first day attempting to talk to the locals, and watching these two girls confer on how to put the sentence “I can’t speak English” together for a good minute. It was adorable. I knew what they were trying to say after 4 seconds, of course, but who am I to interrupt something so cute.

So the talking was a big fat failure. So I ventured out to the A-bomb dome. Beautiful day, really nice place and fucked up insects. Everything that came near me had some kind of warning colour. Mosquitoes were black with white stripes (or vice versa) and the spider that almost ate my book was black with yellow stripes (or vice versa).

I also listened to the chants from the baseball stadium and wished I had tickets to whatever game that was. Fuck yeah, baseball!

Also checked out the castle. The court yard is insanely quiet. Really tranquil. If I were a Hiroshimaian, that is totally where I would choose as the perfect make-out spot.

The Castle

And then the place was pretty much out of stuff. It has about four thousand memorials to people that died in the bombing, and I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but most of the memorials look horrible.  The dome is an amazing legacy though. I can’t believe it didn’t get that “never allowed to tear it down” stamp until the nineties.

I got tired of lugging my baggage around though and decided to just head back to Tokyo. Took the Shinkansen back. Talk about precision, speed and legroom!

Shinkansen+babe

Odd thing. I felt like I got home when I got off at Shinjuku station. How fucked up is that.