We left Himeji late afternoon, but had a surprisingly large amount of things still to happen. Everything at this point, was completely unplanned, which made it even more exciting that it worked out so well.

First we found food. While in the castle we’d seen a carnival in some park grounds nearby, so we headed there for some street food. We bought skewered pork and chicken, an okonomiyaki-on-a-stick (mine also had an egg – a clean-up disaster waiting to happen. Except that I’d been carrying a wet nap from the airplane all week!) and some deep fried and battered chicken skin. The only photo I got was this, because after this my hands were to dirty to touch the camera!

This next photo is one I forgot in the last post. This is the view of Himeji castle from the Himeji train station. Pretty badass looking!

We decided to head on the train to Hiroshima. We’d never discussed going there, but we were only an hour away by train and our JR rail passes gave us free transport that way, so why not!

We got to Hiroshima…and cabbed to Costco. Sean apparently has a thing for visiting Costcos in foreign countries, so we followed up our carnival dinner with a Costco hot dog. 🙂

Then we cabbed to Peace Park. This is a beautiful park, lost of grass and neat concrete structures. But it’s darkat this point, so it’s a little eerie too. Not to mention that you can see this guy, looming on the horizon as you slowly walk closer to it.

It’s a beast of a building. The entire city has been rebuilt and built up and is nice and modern, and then there’s still ugly, wrecked thing in the middle of it, and then you think about how it came to be wrecked, really think about it hard, and the horror of it all dawns in your mind. It’s a beautiful building, and I hope they never decide to take it down.

We got lost through the city for a bit afterwards, but ended up at Hiroshima Castle park. I saw some guys walk out of this gatehouse…so we walked into it.

And we kept walking through the park.

Now in Vancouver, or North America, when a tourist attraction is shut down, there are gates and signs and stuff. Not here, it’s a straight shot all the way through the park.

Until you finally get to the castle, which was closed. Naturally. It’s 10pm and we’re in the middle of a closed Japanese park. It was pretty fun getting here, and then leaving to catch our train home. When we got to the station we had 20 minutes until the last train to Osaka left, but it was a little fearful for a bit that we might not make it.

Then the hard decision of whether to sleep on the train home or not. 😛 I decided not to, and read my book the whole way home.

A pretty great day. 🙂