Sydney Life

So to attempt to kill jatlag, I spent a week in Japan on the way home. Amazingly, my brother had flown there as a surprise – the whole staff of the hotel were in on it and found the arrival very exciting!

The Japanese people are so wonderful! I’ve never heard the word Thank you (oragato gazymus! Totally not how you spell it, but going for phonetics here! :p) said repeatedly so many times! As soon as you ask a question or ask for something, they’ll run off to help you, and they have hilarious sense of humour! We were heading into a temple and had to take our shoes off, some people on the tour were hesitant and the guide just goes ‘Don’t worry, no-one will steal them – you’re Western feet are too big!!’

The most powerful thing I saw in Japan would have to be the A-bomb memorial park in Hiroshima. There’s a building there left as it was immediately after the bombing – it is just a shell really. The museum was amazing – there were all these warped objects from the intense heat (apparently the bomb was like 5000 degrees Celsius), including people’s skin which had melted. Sorry for those mental images if gore is hard for you, but it was so moving. You can still really see the effect of the bomb on the Japanese psyche, and there’s all these letters written by the mayor of Hiroshima to the Ambassadors of any country who perform nuclear testing, begging them to get rid of their bombs. A lot of the museum is dedicated to making you feel like nuclear bombs just cannot exist, and after seeing the effect of just one bomb, you can’t help but feel like there is so much power and potential for loss that you leave hating the idea that these bombs still exist.