31 March 2013 · Comment
Some more pictures
Hello! I’m doing another blarg entry on the train. This time I’m going from Magome, a really pretty historically preserved old post town, to Atami, a beach city on the Izu Peninsula just south of Tokyo that I’ve been wanting to visit for the last six years ever since I got a super brief glimpse of it while I was taking the train from Tokyo to Kyoto and then I was like, what is this magical city I must find its name! And now I am here and life is pretty great. Also, after this post I’m only three places behind instead of four! Progress!
After I left Nara, I went back to Osaka to see more of it than just the inside of the Apple store. This is a picture of Doutombori, or Little Blade Runnertown as it’s more commonly known. I stayed at a neat capsule hotel near here but I forgot to take any pictures because I’m the worst at blog. Unlike T-Pain who is the best at songs! What? I don’t know, spending all this time alone in my own head is really taking its toll on my ability to normal.
Some water reflections in Doutombori. Ooooo.
The next morning, I got up butt early and got last minute tickets to a sumo tournament! It was so neat! The atmosphere was like a baseball game, but sumo has a big religious component so it was way different from any sporting event I’ve ever been to. I think this picture shows the ring getting prepared for the matches, which involved prayer chanting and the wrestlers stomping on it to get rid of the evil.
Some of the seats were set up for hanging out in them picnic style. People left their shoes in the aisle in front of or behind their picnic boxes.
There are no weight classes in sumo and wrestlers get paired up randomly within their peer group, so sometimes a pretty skinny dude would have to fight someone twice his weight. I don’t know how well this picture shows it, but that’s what’s going on here. I think in match ups like this the bigger wrestler won every time except once that I saw and that one time was because the smaller guy was really fast and took the bigger dude by surprise.
The ring is raised a few feet off the ground and lots of times the wrestlers would fall out of it and onto like, their spines and it gave me such bad sympathy pains. Also, they tie their hair in different designs based on their level and it’s supposed to provide some protection from falls but knowing they depend on hair for any level of protection just gives me worse sympathy pains.
Then I went to Miyajima! It’s an island near Hiroshima that has wild deer like in Nara. Deer, what are you doing on the beach. You are a deer. You belong in the forest.
There’s a really pretty mountainy hike on the island. I did the lazy version and took the ropeway to the top and then hiked down. This area is called the Misen Primeval Forest, but sadly I didn’t see any dinosaurs.
Some Miyajima deer. A lady was feeding one of them off the ledge so they all started swarming to her and then she ran out of food so they started climbing the ledge even thought it was really tall compared to them and it was kind of scary but still pretty adorable.
A waterfowl.
Some things in a temple. I don’t knowwww it’s just more proof of my ignorance. They’ve had things like this in lots of other temples so I really should have asked someone by now but I was too busy being lazy.
Some more templiness.
And the floating torii! It’s not the best picture but I only had one night in Miyajima and the sunset just wasn’t happening on account of all the fog and I was getting a mild case of the travel grumps so I called it a day.
Next are some pictures that are from my cell phone so they’re out of order with the rest. I feel like on the last hobo trip that would have bothered me to no end but this time it’s just like eh wutever.
A delicious egg pizza! Somehow I had this idea that I would be eating nonstop delicious and authentic Japanese food on this trip, but then I got here and remembered that it’s super hard to find vegetarian Japanese food and it feels like you’re being a big pain in the tuchus when you ask for something to be made without meat so that’s a stinker. But I’m still eating pretty delicious and unusual food, so that’s a non-stinker! Like this pizza. It was really tasty and I think I’m gonna try making it at home! Embraaaacing new cultuuuuuures! Haaaaaving new expeeeeeriences! Ho ho ho ho hoooooooo!
A phone picture of the Fushimi Inari torii.
JoBooB! There are just so many freaking adorable advertisements here and it’s great. It really makes me want to doodle and use the tiny art supply kit I brought but I haven’t yet on account of my crushing laziness.
. .
-o
A phone picture of the sumo arena.
Cherry blossoms in Hiroshima! Most of what I did in Hiroshima was related to the Atomic Bomb Museum and memorials and they all gave me an enormous sad so I didn’t take many pictures but the rest of the city was really pretty like these cherry blossoms on the riverbank! They had just bloomed a few days before so tons of people were doing hanami, which is picnicking and day drinking under the cherry blossoms! What a spectacular custom.
And finally, some buildings in Hiroshima. I’d totally recommend going there and seeing the Atomic Bomb Museum if you get a chance despite the debilitating sadness that could result. The museum is surprisingly even-handed in its description of the events leading up to the war, and one of the guides talked to me for a long time about a bunch of different aspects of the bombing. Like, did you know that residents of Hiroshima don’t think there should even be nuclear power plants because of the harmful effects of any kind of radiation? I mean, it does make sense but I always just took it for granted that nuclear power was a good thing overall, at least compared to fossil fuels.
Also I’d heard that the scientists who developed the bomb wanted to show Japan a test first and give them the chance to surrender and I never really understood why the US military didn’t agree to it, but the museum had a bunch of internal memos talking about how they thought they had to use the bomb on a real city in order to justify its huge expense to the American public. Which I still don’t know if I completely believe, but it is a more substantial reason than just the people running the military being bloodthirsty. And I learned a ton more interesting stuff but probably everyone else knows about it already because they didn’t learn the entire syllabus of American history in the two week period preceding the AP test and then promptly forget it.
Welp, those are the Osaka, Miyajima, Hiroshima and assorted random phone pictures! I’m in Ito next to Atami now and I’ll be here for two and a half more days, then I’m going back up to Tokyo to go to the Ghibli Museum yaaaaaaaay! And to buy presents and to get on the plane to Europe but mostly to go to the Ghibli Museum yaaaaaaaaaaaay!
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