In Japan, there is a holiday called Golden Week. It is a series of holidays that last approximately a week. They don’t really seem to serve much of a purpose other than to get the entire country off of work and crowd every known popular spot in Japan. Which means it’s probably best not to take a vacation during this time because everyone else is. Or, if you’re my host family, you DO take that vacation, if only to keep up with the Tanakas.
I’m still a little bit disappointed in the logistics of the whole thing. Maybe that’s because I’m from a family that I would consider good at this sort of thing, or maybe my host family is not very good at this sort of thing. Instead of leaving on Friday night when everyone was free from commitment, we decided to leave on Saturday. Surely this should mean hitting the road at like 6 or 7 in the morning to maximize the day and minimize traffic. Apparently what leaving on Saturday meant was leaving at 3:30. And stopping in Nagoya at 8:30. For dinner with a family friend and then heading over to their house where I wasn’t sure if we were staying the night or just visiting. Turned out to be just visiting, as we got back on the road at midnight. Did I mention stopping at nearly every single rest station? Okay, that’s probably an exageration, but between a 5-year old and a 10-year old when one or the other didn’t have to use the restroom, someone was hungry, or cranky. We finally arrived on Sunday morning in Hiroshima Prefecture to visit the island of Miyajima (Okay, to be fair, the island is actually called Itsukushima, but it is commonly referred to as Miyajima. Also, another interesting thing to note here is shima/jima is the Japanese character for island, so sometimes it sounds silly to me to say Miyajima Island, or Miya Island Island.) This is essentially the route we took to get there.
Miyajima was pretty cool, if not completely overtaken by tourists. Here’s one of those obligatory tourist pictures. I’m sure you’ve seen this before. It is a world heritage site, after all.
And then there’s this photo that I took from inside the shrine. I like it much more.
After that we drove to my host-father’s parents’ house in Hiroshima Prefecture. A nice house on a small island, it seemed like it would have been a wonderful place to grow up. I really do love the sea. The next day we went to a festival. I’m not really sure what it was, but it was on the beach, so I didn’t complain. I had the opportunity to row a small boat that was used by Japanese pirates in the area. It was a 12 or so man rowboat with a drummer in the back to keep everyone in time. It was quite fun. Then we grabbed lunch before the host-kids were entered into the “Fish Catch n’ Take” For an entrance fee of 500 yen (~$5) middle schoolers and younger got the chance to get into a pool with gloves on and try and catch up to three fish that were just caught by the fishing boats offshore. It was an amusing sight. Both my host-brother and host-sister hit their limit of three fish (okay, so really, one was an octopus…) and at that we headed home. What did we have for dinner? Sashimi. (Raw fish.) I was actually a bit scared at first even though I’ve been eating raw fish since I got here. There was nothing to worry about as it was extremely delicious having been so fresh.
After some more lazing in Hiroshima, we packed up for another long drive back up to Osaka. We got in late on Tuesday and crashed in a hotel for the evening. In the morning we took a quick jaunt over to Osaka castle which was pretty interesting. I really like Japanese castles.
After that, we took the one hour drive to Kyoto and stopped by Kinkakuji, the golden pavilion. More pictures. It’s easy to describe things that way.
Then it was off for a long lunch which meant putting off more driving. Ugh. We finally left Kyoto around 5ish? Many stops later, including an hour long road-side hot bath trip (yeah, what?), and a bunch of Traffic, we got home around three in the morning. If was a fun trip, but needless to say, I did not go to my morning class the next day.
Tags: castle, hiroshima, kinkakuji, kyoto, miyajima, osaka, road trip
Posted May 8, 2009 by Cory under Japan, Photography
May 10th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Hello,
Where are you from? Is it a secret?
May 14th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Minnesota!
May 18th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Ah yes, the obligatory photo of Ginkakuji