Japan 2023

February 19th, 2023

Our last day in Hiroshi­ma. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the sky was cloudy again. But at least it did not rain. We first enjoyed anoth­er exten­sive break­fast with a panoram­ic view over­look­ing Hiroshi­ma. After that we want­ed to vis­it Hiroshi­ma Castle.

Hiroshi­ma Cas­tle was com­plete­ly destroyed by the atom­ic bomb­ing on August 6th, 1945. The repli­ca, built in 1958, now serves as a muse­um of Hiroshima’s his­to­ry before World War II. Col­or­ful giant koi carp swam in the wide moat.

Since we had enough time until the depar­ture of our Shinkansen, we also vis­it­ed the inte­ri­ors of the cas­tle again, as in 2014. It is also affec­tion­ate­ly known as the Carp Cas­tle. Inside the cas­tle you are not allowed to take pic­tures, there is only a des­ig­nat­ed pho­to spot in a few places. The foun­da­tions of the cas­tle are 12.4 meters high, the actu­al cas­tle itself anoth­er 26.6 meters. Inside, you can climb steep stairs to the top floor. Once at the top, you have a nice view of the city on a nar­row exte­ri­or walkway.

Kyōto

Kyō­to was the res­i­dence of the Impe­r­i­al Court of Japan from 794 to 1868 and is now the admin­is­tra­tive seat of Kyō­to Pre­fec­ture. The city is known for its numer­ous Bud­dhist tem­ples, its gar­dens, impe­r­i­al palaces, Shin­tō shrines and tra­di­tion­al wood­en hous­es. It is esti­mat­ed that there are more than 1,600 tem­ples and shrines in the city. Among them are world-famous ones, such as the Kinkaku-ji (the Gold­en Pavil­ion) or the Fushi­mi Inari Taisha Shrine with its thou­sands of torii arch­es. Because of the many places to vis­it, we planned six days for our stay in Kyōto.

After arriv­ing safe­ly in Kyō­to by Shinkansen, we moved into our apart­ment at Mimaru Kyō­to Sta­tion. It is locat­ed very close to the Shinkansen sta­tion, so we could eas­i­ly walk there. It is part of the same hotel chain as our apart­ment in Tokyo, so we imme­di­ate­ly felt com­fort­able. The apart­ment was again very nice. Instead of the Tokyo Skytree, we now had a view of the mod­ern Shinkansen sta­tion in Kyōto.

After unpack­ing, we first bought some food at the near­by kon­bi­ni “7-Eleven” for tomorrow’s break­fast. Then we took a walk to the tem­ple Tō-ji with its pago­da, which was illu­mi­nat­ed in the evening. Going into the com­plex was not pos­si­ble for us, because every­thing clos­es here already at 17:00.

For din­ner we chose a nice lit­tle restau­rant called “Takara” near the pago­da, where we had again Shabu-Shabu, the Japan­ese form of Fon­due Chi­noise. With­out Luise we again would have been lost. The menu was only avail­able in Japan­ese. We then took the local spe­cial­i­ty with duck meat, which was very tasty. In addi­tion, we had white wine for Simone, banana milk­shake and gin­ger ale for Luise and an Asahi beer for me (after­wards a sake as a night­cap). Simone liked the broth espe­cial­ly well at the end.

After that we went back to our hotel tired.