Okayama and hiroshima

Okayama was kinda refreshing, just in the way that it felt a bit less full on japanese than everywhere else ive been so far. They have loads of vietnamese and Italian restaurants here and therere no tourists or queues to get into the places i want to go to. I was incredibly slack here and only saw a park, a castle and the statue of the peach kid with the off centre penis (https://youtu.be/hshz2LhxuPY?si=dBAfRKU3WSFYVuTP). The highlight of okayama was the sashimi restaurant i went to, they serve a kind of deconstructed okayama style sushi (bara zushi) which is pretty much just a heap of pre sauced/seasoned sashimi pieces all heaped on a rice bowl but they put a bit of orange zest on the rice which makes it taste sooooo nice! The place was called fukuzushi and i ate there for both dinners coz i loved the orange zest thing so much ahaha.

After okayama i went to hiroshima. The first thing i did when i arrived was go see the peace museum. It was filled with loads and loads of horrific photos and stories from survivors of the stomic bomb. The stories were heavy and some photos were super graphic. There was a section of the museum dedicated to objects that had been fused together from the heat of the blast which was really interesting. For example there was a clump of glass that used to be a tray of milk bottles sitting on someones porch, the blurb under them said they were sitting about 1km from the explosion and they were explosed to a heat of over 1000 degrees. Everything in the museum did a really good job of showing how insanely insense it all was. There was also a section dedicated to sadako sasaki, the paper crane girl we learned about in primary school. Some of the paper cranes she made were on display in the museum. I was really surprised how tiny they were, apparently she grew so weak she couldnt do big folds so she used chopsticks and made tiny ones instead, which seems way harder but idk.
By the time i left the museum i felt a bit numb and tingly so I stopped for a beer at a park overlooking the atomic bomb dome and the T bridge. The T bridge was what the pilot was aiming for when he dropped the atomic bomb. It was pretty surreal sitting there knowing that the most destructive force ever used was deployed right above were i was sitting. For the rest of the day i just roamed around and ate okonomiyaki. Hiroshima style okonomiyaki is probably just as good as the osaka style, its more like a crepe filled with lots of vegies and egg. They forgot to put kimchi in my okonomiyaki and were super reluctant to take it off my bill so i had to fight the waitress about that for a bit lol.Read more