City Centre

In the last two days, I have been to Hiroshima city centre twice. This is partly due to bad timing on my part - I organised a trip to say goodbye to a good friend who's going abroad, not realising that another friend was having a birthday party the next evening.

Anyway, on the first trip we met up with a Japanese friend of ours who is going to New Zealand for a year, and therefore won't be back in time to see us again. After dinner, he suggested we go and see the atomic bomb dome, which a couple of us had never been to before. I didn't realise exactly how close to the main shopping street it is - we walked for only five minutes to get there. It was already dark, but the dome is slightly lit up from inside at night, and it really does leave an impression. Pictures don't do this thing justice. It's not that it's huge, in fact it was smaller than I expected, but the level of destruction you see before your eyes is quite shocking, and they did really leave it completely as it was, with rubble lying around.

Then, when you walk over to the peace memorial park, you can see it from over the river, and it's eerily beautiful. I wish I'd taken some photos, now, but I imagine there's enough of them on the internet already. The park seems to have become a sleeping place for homeless people, in and amongst the monuments scattered about, which include a fire that never goes out, and a stone arc which is perfectly placed so you can see the dome through it. At the other end of the park are some huge perspex boxes with thousands of paper cranes inside, strung together to make long, colourful strings, all made by children from various schools. The place does make you think, but I don't regret going for a second.

The day afterwards, we went for okonomiyaki before heading to a bar. Before I came to Japan, everyone who heard I was going to Hiroshima said "try okonomiyaki!" and it really is fantastic, but I'd never been to a place like this before. There's a whole building, five floors, which is full of small, mostly family-run okonomiyaki joints, with seating for maybe ten people in each. The one we ended up in was run by a husband and wife, both around 60, who had obviously been doing the same thing for years and years, and had paper stuck up all around the walls with signatures of famous people who had been there. The food was delicious, naturally.

But what interested me the most was the fact that in the middle of a big city centre, there are still little family-run outlets doing business. In London, even in Sheffield, the city centres are full of massive chain stores - even in small English towns nowadays the family-run businesses are disappearing because of the big stores. But in Hiroshima, which is bigger than Sheffield, little husband-and-wife run okonomiyaki outlets are still there and still doing business. I love that.

Spring Break

The first few days being back in Japan have been different from what I imagined.

Because it's spring break, a lot of people are away, either travelling, visiting their home countries or, in the case of the Japanese people, their home towns. Two good friends are in Korea and a few more have been while I was in England; one is back in America; a few more are back in Osaka or their respective home towns. So it's quiet around here.

Still, I got to do the only travelling I've done since I've been here: I was invited to go on a day trip to Shikoku, the southern island, with a couple of Japanese friends and one of the Americans, which was fantastic. I didn't know this, but Shikoku is famous for soba (thick wheat noodles), so we ate half our lunch at one of the soba places and the other half at another one. This is down the road from the first:

The Japanese countryside is stunning, isn't it? There were miles of fields with houses just scattered seemingly randomly across them; traditional houses mixed with newer traditional-style ones and newer western-style ones. Outside you could see people working tiny little garden-fields, mostly elderly - it's only when you get outside the university town that you can really see how unbalanced the population is.

Between lunches, we went to a famous beauty spot - a traditional park originally built for one of the Tokugawa period prefecture rulers, the Daimyo. It really was beautiful:

And I got to try dango - it's a traditional Japanese sweet which I saw in a Japanese cartoon once and always wanted to try. I'm not sure what it's made of, but it's very very chewy and comes in three balls on a stick. It was nicer than I expected, actually.

I think I'll remember that day as one of the best - although hopefully there will be ones to rival it in the future.

Flights

Three Episodes which Prove why I Take After my Mother when it Comes to Public Transport.

Episode One

Firstly, I must explain the layout of this plane. It was hardly even half full, so I amazingly ended up with the whole middle three seats to myself. On the left was a young couple, and on the right was a mother with her 6 or 7 year-old child. Behind the couple was a middle-aged Australian man.

Now, about halfway through the flight, when everyone was asleep except, apparently, me and the Australian man (I can’t sleep on planes; I don’t know his reason), he suddenly decided to turn on his light. The positioning of his light, as it happened, made it so that I could make shadow puppets on the seat in front of me, so naturally, I made a dog and got it to sing along to the music I was listening to at the time. I was rather enjoying this, until I realised that the little boy at the end of the row had in fact woken up, and was now staring at me with sheer puzzlement. He of course couldn’t see the shadows and was therefore wondering why the apparently fully-grown lady along the row was making her hand talk to her.

Episode Two

My sister gave me a little toy penguin to cuddle on the plane, which was very nice of her. This particular penguin stands up of its own accord and is about the right size to hold with one hand. Now because I had three seats to myself I decided to lie across them to see if I could get any sleep (result: none, see earlier). At one point I happened to be holding the penguin and lay on my back with my hand, holding the penguin facing my head, on my chest. Needless to say, I got the shock of my life when I opened my eyes a few minutes later and thought the Penguin of Death had come to get me at last.

Episode Three

Waiting in the “Foreign Passport” queue at Hiroshima Airport, I noticed that the man in front of me was white (that may sound normal but we were probably the only two in the airport) and had a passport coloured exactly the same as mine. I had also seen him on the flight from London. I now wonder why I felt I had to speak to him in the first place. I guess it was because, as aforementioned, we were the only two white people in the airport, but anyway. Great, I thought, another English person! I shall make a patriotic comment! “We’re winning the Six Nations!”, I proclaimed enthusiastically, waiting for a joyful agreement.

“That’s great,” he said, slightly sarcastically, in a very Irish accent. “How much are you winning by?”

Luckily, after I’d apologised, he didn’t seem to mind too much and we chatted until we got to the front of the queue. Later on, however, I think he was glad I’d made the mistake, because he couldn’t speak any Japanese, and I happened to be waiting for a bus as he was trying to explain a few things to an information assistant who couldn’t speak English, so I helped him out.

I think this proves, to anyone who has read my mum’s blog, that I take after her in more than just eye colour.

England

Sorry for not posting anything recently - I haven't had anything particularly interesting to talk about, so I haven't talked, as it were.

I'm back in England for a month. It's been two weeks already and I've got another two to go. And I have to say, I miss Japan. I don't really see it as "coming home", as such, because I haven't really had a proper home in England since I went to university and my parents moved up to the Midlands. Hiroshima, now, feels like as much a home as Sheffield or Leamington ever did.

That, plus the fact that the friends I've made on the HUSA program are some of the best I've ever had, makes it harder to be away than I expected. Facebook doesn't help either, with its daily reminders of how much fun everyone's having without me. Sure, I might be bored, stuck in my cold room, but at least in Japan there'd be people to be bored with.

Now I'm wondering what it's going to be like when I leave for good in August. Since most of my friends in Japan are in fact American, Japanese or Korean, there's a good chance I'll never see a lot of them again - and that's a horrible thing to think about. Shame I've had a lot of time to think about it.

Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if it were a few months, but a year is such an awkward length of time. It's long, but it goes so quickly. It's enough to get to know people but too soon to leave them. And language wise, it's enough to improve, but not nearly enough for fluency, which is something I was misled into believing.

Don't get me wrong; I don't regret going, not in the slightest. So far, it's been the best time of my life. It's just that being back in England has made me realise how fast I have to leave the best time of my life, and go "back home" to carry on as if it had never been.