RUNDOWN OF JAPAN: Day 5

I woke up and rode the Shinkansen down to Hiroshima. Things were getting much smoother because I was remembering my high school classes and recalling the words that I needed to communicate in Japanese.

I booked a room at the Aster Plaza International Youth House. This is part of two floors of accommodations located above a concert hall. The room was perfect and the room was extremely affordable.

During my first day in Hiroshima I went to the Peace Park and the Atomic Bomb Museum. I won't try to summarize the experience, but I'll save it for a longer essay that will be written and posted some other time. The lesson that resonates with me from seeing the memorials, museum, and preserved destruction is how inhuman and cruel it is to have a device that could, even accidentally, raze an entire city in under a minute. Imagine the sadness that passes by you when you see a bad traffic accident. Multiple this sadness by 100,000 and it is how tragic it is to view the sites in Hiroshima.

Back at Aster Plaza, I spent the evening talking with a spunky and beautiful Australian exchange student named Meredith. She studies law and Asian studies and it was her third time in Japan. She told me all about Australia's government, the aesthetics of Japanese game shows, her experiences learning Japanese, dealing with being away from your family and loved ones, and the differences between life in Japan and life in Australia.

For dinner that night I ate a delicious bowl of Udon and discovered a very good brand of Japanese gummy candy.

Before bed I watched some American TV. It was an episode of Inside the Actor's Studio and Jane Fonda was being interviewed. She talked about how much she regretted posing with Vietnamese soldiers and how she became a Christian after being meeting some Eastern Europeans.