Kobe, Japan

So I came back on the ship when we sailed back to Kobe just for the mere fact that Japan is soo expensive! It was really nice though because the ship was really quite and we even had a formal dinner on board!

We pulled up into to Kobe and I thought it looked a lot like Yokohama (O and PS there are Farris Wheels in all of the cities that we have been in) and guess what it was raining!

My first day in Kobe I woke up and I went on my first SAS trip to a Japanese tea ceremony! We drove to the city of Osaka and got to a very large Buddhist community. We spent some time visiting some temples and some gardens before we went to go have our tea. The tea ceremony took place at a Zen Buddhist temple/home and one of the monks met us and gave us a tour, showed us the some of the Zen gardens and led us to the tea room. The ceremony was really interesting but amazing at the same time. There are so many different rules that go along with it: how you sit and at what times, how you breathe, how you hold the different tools, how you eat, how you drink everything….. it was very hard to try and do everything right. One of the oddest things was that they used powered green tea that they stir in with all these special utensils. They say that the powered tea is better than brewing it with tea leaves.

After the Tea ceremony we went to the beautiful golden pavilion. It was a very gorgeous place and the gardens around it were very beautiful as well. That night we went out to spend time in the city of Kobe. We had another dinner at a place were there was no English so you just hope that the couple of pictures that you see on the menus turn out to be edible food! We got some beer out of the vending machines and watched a “football” match which was a lot of fun.

On the last day in Japan we woke up and went into the train station and bought roundtrip tickets on the bullet trains down to Hiroshima. The train was crazy fast but the scenery was amazing and I was able to see a lot on our 4 hr long ride. I thought by going by train I was able to see a lot and really see what the countryside of Japan looked like.

When we walked up to Hiroshima park the very first thing we saw was the A-dome and I remember thinking how shocked I was to see it because it looked like something that came out of a movie, but I knew it was real. As we stood around and admired the building a man walked up to us and we were not quite sure who he was and he just started talking to us, we later found out that he is a survivor of the A-bomb. He has a certificate that states that he is in fact a survivor even though his mom was 6 months pregnant with him at that time. So he told us that being a survivor, he felt that it is his duty to come to this park whenever he can and show people around the sites and tell them stories of what had happened. So he did and he taught us a lot, he showed us all the major landmarks, cemeteries, and lots of little things that many people would not be able to see. After all of that he led us to the museum, which was really interesting. It was very sad to see and there was some pretty disturbing stuff in there but I really enjoyed visiting the museum because I now feel like I have a better understanding of what happened so long ago and even how it effects the present.

Well that was it for Japan! I can’t even wait to go back there someday and just visit the rest of the country and spend more time learning there culture and …… I just really loved every minute of the time I spent in Japan, I already miss it!