Four days of being a tourist in Japan

I went on a trip to Hirsohima Friday-Sunday with friends and then Kyoto and Nara with my grade 6 classes Monday-Tuesday. The pictures are in reverse order that I took them, so bare with me. (I'm still not friends with blogspot's treatment of photo placement)




On my field trip I saw 7 temples in 2 days. That's a whole lotta Buddha. One of them is also featured on the 10Yen coin (check it out on Wikipedia) Another one in Nara is home to one of the biggest wooden Buddahs, and is, if i recall correctly, over 2,000 years old. It's also huge and has many deer who live around it. The deer are very friendly and poop everywhere. For the rest of the day the bus smelled
vaugly of deer poop. lovely.



































The one of me standing on a mountain is on Miwajima Island, just off of Hirsohima. On the Saturday we took the cable car up most of the way and then climbed the the very top for some spectacular views and then clambered down. Miwajima is also home to the "floating" tori, apparently one of the most scenic spots in all of Japan, and also, like Nara, many deer. The deer here were more depressing though and I saw one eating garbage off the beach and it saddened me. But it was quite beautiful aside from that.


















At night we went out for Hiroshima- yaki, which is Hiroshima's special version of Okonomiyaki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okonomiyaki) and walking about the town. For a city that doesn't have a single building older than 60 years old it's pretty impressively built up. I found the random orb on an early morning walk, and looked at the cities rather uniformly modern architecture.



We spent Sunday in Hiroshima visiting the A-bomb dome (a building that was still standing-more or less- after the bomb was dropped,) and the Peace Museum. It was very well done and fairly even sided. The park surrounding the museum and A-bomb dome is full of memorials and paper cranes. The cranes are have become an international symbol of peace, due to the story of the little girl, named Sadako, suffering from leukemia, (a byproduct of being exposed to radiation when the bomb went off) who tried to make 1,000 paper cranes, which upon completion would make her wish to get better come true. She didn't finish them but every year kids come and bring their own 1,000 cranes with the wish that no bombs will ever be dropped again.