An earth shattering Kaboom & getting white girl wasted. Hiroshima.

We found Hiroshima to be a pretty full on place. Emotionally, that is. Maybe we're just soft in our old age?  We decided to arrive as early as possible from Kyoto to make the most of our time as we only had one full day there, and we actually managed to get around and see the museum and all of the war memorial things on the day that we arrived. The area was smaller than what we thought, and there was a hop-on hop-off tourist bus that our JR Rail passed allowed us to use that helped us get around and see everything very easily. 

We started with the Museum, which had displays of the city and described how far reaching the devastation was (the bomb pretty much wiped out the whole city at 4000 degrees). There were lots of displays of children's clothing who died soon after the blast, and the photos of people's burns were just horrific. Remember that scene in Terminator where Sarah Connor is looking over the kids playground, there is bright light, and then the meat gets blasted off her? I had the impression it was like that.

We walked around the city and saw the Bomb Dome (the restored remains of a bombed building), saw the epi-center (just a spot on the road where they put a plaque marking the spot where the bomb actually dropped), walked through a few memorial parks, and went to the most beautiful Japanese Garden that we've seen since we've been in Japan. The garden actually had the only tree in Hiroshima that survived the blast and is in it's original position (there are a bunch of trees that survived but were relocated). The tree is a massive ginkgo tree and it's on like a 45 degree angle and had all it's branches blown off. It's thick and healthy now though.  Combine all of these things with the statues of mothers holding their dead toddlers and Sadako Sasaki's thousand paper crane memorial, well, we rounded out the day feeling like our emotions had just taken a tennis ball to the nuts. 

I found Hiroshima to have a bit of a similar feeling to it that Berlin did. There is an echo of past horror that you can just feel on the breeze and see in people's faces. It's a solemness. But also something that defiantly says 'we're still here mother fuckers'.  

Exhausted, we stumbled home to our humble hostel nestled between the train line and a cemetery, and made very, very good friends with the booze vending machine in the kitchen. 

Fuck it. Time to let our hair down, take off the slippers, change out the chamomile tea bag for a Irish breakfast tea bag.  That's right, it's business time bitches. 

It was an emotional day, our trip was coming to a close, we were down to our last few thousand yen, and just needed to let our hair down and celebrate all that we had done and seen. We also wanted to celebrate Hiroshima. We both felt very proud of the community that has rebuilt itself from the ground up (literally) and is now thriving.  

I got a can from the vending machine had lemons on it and some confusing words. Throwing it back in about 5 minutes, I grabbed a handful of change and exclaimed loudly to Victoria as I walked out the door "Man, that wasn't even alcoholic. I'm going back down to get what you've got!' Victoria, who was sipping from her giant can that had a grapefruit and 12% written on it, just stared after me glassy eyed and said something like 'what..?'. What was in these drinks? No freakin idea. I think maybe Shochu and soda but that's just a guess. I cannonballed the next giant can of grapefruit something while we got ready to go out. I'm fairly sure we very noisy. We tipped over the rubbish bin and used it as a speaker (put my phone inside it) and played spotify none too softly. I hope everyone likes Blink182 as much as we do. And yes, the bin was full of trash before we tipped it over. I'm sorry, good cleaning people of the hostel. So sorry.

We'd grabbed a brochure from reception which had a map and a bunch of 'must see' bars etc marked out on it.  Micks, we decided, was the place we wanted to go. It was an Izakaya with an impressive sake selection. We had our tourist map and confidently strode out the door and into the night.

20 mins later....

Victoria: There should be a river here. 
Me: What?
Victoria: There should be a river here. 
Me: I...dude, I don't know what that means. 
Victoria: There isn't a river here.  So I have no idea where we are. 
 Me: *blank look* 

So that's when we decided to get a taxi. We pointed frantically at our shitty tourist map to the driver. 

Me: Micks, Micks o kudasai!?  
Taxi man: Micks...micks....micks....oooo...

Anyway he started driving. He seems nice, I thought.  About 7 mins later he drops us off and guestures to the map vaguely around Micks and then and points to a police station and tells us to ask them where Micks is. Lol, ok, thanks buddy! Haha, yeah we're not doing that.  We got this.  So we stride off past the cop shop and down some alleys, and hats off to Victoria because as usual I had no fucking idea where I was, but we ended up in front of Micks. We go in and it is indeed an Izakaya. There was the kitchen, a bar running along the outside of it, and a couple of small tables. There was a group of Japanese girls celebrating a birthday (they were singing happy birthday, in English) so that was nice.  

We sat at the bar and ordered drinks - I had the most amazing Jasmine Umeshu (actually apparently I had a few of them but I only remember the first) and Victoria got some massive pint of something mixed with something purple. We got some food (karage? I honestly have no idea), but I remember it being amazing. Now, sake time. Hiroshima is apparently known for its sake brewing, and we hadn't had any yet, so it was time to rip the band-aid off.  We picked something that sounded interesting, and it came in a little bottle with two little pottery shot glasses. I won't tell you how it was, the pictures speak for themselves. 

The girls in Micks were cute as. We yelled out happy birthday to them and they were very excited. They said hello to us in English, and we said hello back in Japanese, meanwhile I think both parties were just thinking 'man I'm trying to practice a foreign language here, speak your native language god damn it!'. 

We left Micks and went in search of another drinking hole. At the time I felt like we were very composed and were just casually strolling down a lane way, when all of a sudden I found myself on the road. What actually happened, I'm fairly sure, was that I was drunkenly swerving all over the place, Victoria was completely ignoring me while giggling and taking photos of everything including a hotel that she was sure was a love hotel but after looking at the photos it was just a regular hotel, when I somehow got my legs tangled around hers and I tripped myself.  She was just standing there looking at me on the road like 'What are you doing down there, lol?'.  

Anyway, after she/I tripped me, we found a bar that had FREE SNACKS on the table, and we sat there and ate way more of these free snacks than what was decent. The lovely barman just refilled them and now that I think about it was laughing. I think the whole staff was laughing at us actually. I also think we were the only girls in there and definitely the only white people.  Well joke's on you bar man, we both got home and found our pockets FULL of your delicious snacks.

After we stumbled out of that random snack bar, we ended up at.... oh I don't even want to say it. But I will. We went to Karaoke. Sigh. Yep. So you get a private room and maybe a free drink (we didn't really understand what we paid for and we also couldn't figure out how to order anything from the room).  By the time I went to the bathroom and came back, Victoria had lined up a play list and was already singing. I sat there in drunken stubbornness for an impressive amount of time, until Victoria figure out the buttons that changed your voice. So we were able to yell at the T.V in a deep mans voice, a cartoon voice, an alien, you name it. I wouldn't call it singing. I'm pretty sure we were just yelling and swearing and laughing really obnoxiously loudly for an hour.  They came and kicked us out after an hour because we refused to stop when they buzzed the room as we were in the middle of Bohemian Rhapsody. No one stops in the middle of Queen. No one. 

So after the polite man came up and asked us to leave, we decided we had better go home. We didn't even throw up. When people ask me what part of Japan I liked the most, this night is the first thing that comes to mind.

Thank you Victoria, my oldest drinking buddy. The next day we just dragged ourselves around the shops, I won a bunch of small toys from a skill tester, and we ate this weird noodle pancake thing that was apparently a 'must do' in Hiroshima.  It was good.