On our second full day in Japan, we put our JR passes to good use and took a day trip to Hiroshima. Now, the most common question that I get about Hiroshima is “how do you say ‘Hiroshima’?” It may surprise you to find out that one does not need to actually visit Hiroshima to answer this question – there are resources one can consult. Still, in case you’re curious, it is roughly pronounced “Hee-roe-shee-mah” (not “Heer-aw-shim-ah”).
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about what we did that day.
I have a confession to make: This post does not begin in Osaka. It begins in Tokyo. If that concerns you, do not fret; I will get to Osaka soon enough.
We flew in to Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport on an evening flight via Beijing. Haneda was more-or-less like every other airport that we’ve passed through these last two months. The biggest difference was that there was less English than we were had encountered in Chinese airports, which was a little surprising. Oh, and also the airport bathrooms came with educational diagrams and required a technical degree to operate.
We spent one of our generous four-day weekends in Singapore. Singapore is, for me, a hard city to convey through words and photos. It’s beautiful and modern and clean and organized and just generally impressive, but I feel like that only captures little pieces of the experience that is Singapore.
This week we mostly kicked back and relaxed in Hong Kong itself. Aside from generally getting to know our neighborhood, Amelia and I went to Lantau Island with some friends from school. Kat was in Malaysia for the weekend, so she was stuck in Kuala Lumpur with adorable monkeys and elephants (and Patrick, another friend from school) instead of hanging out with us. She won’t make that mistake again, I’m sure.
Lantau Island is like the Buddhist Rio de Janeiro, insofar as it has a gigantic statue of Buddha. Being as I know almost nothing else about Rio de Janeiro (aside from being reasonably certain that it is not in Hong Kong), I’m afraid I won’t be able to expand on that analogy for you. Instead of telling you how Lantau island is like or unlike Rio de Janeiro, from this point on I will just have to tell you what Lantau Island is like and let you take it from there.
[Editor's Note: My computer was out of commission for a while, so I am even further behind on the blog. It's back in working order now, so there will be new posts, but I'll be in Japan for the next few weeks, so they might take a while.]
The Chinese know how to kick off a school semester – with a holiday in the second week of classes. And don’t say “What about Labour Day?” – I mean a real holiday, with celebrations and traditions and history. This week we celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival (or Moon Festival), one of the three big seasonal festivals in Chinese culture. It’s a pretty big deal here – it’s like an amalgamation of Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve and Thanksgiving, except that it has floating lanterns.
We took it easy on our last day in Beijing. Our flight was scheduled for 8:30pm, meaning that we could spend most of our day wandering around the city.
We checked out of our hotel, stowed our luggage with reception, and headed out in search of food. We wandered down Wanfujing Road, a major thoroughfare near our hotel. It was there that we gave in to temptation.