Turning 22 in Japan.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect of my 22nd birthday spent in a strange country without my family, most of my friends and only Mark who knew anything of the occasion. In a country where if you want to order anything other than Coke (a universally understood word apparently) it involves a lot of pointing and gesticulating wildly or mumbling a badly pronounced (rarely understood)sentence from the phrasebook.

We were Hiroshima in the South of Honshu island, Japan; the city where America had dropped the first atomic bomb at 8.15am on August 6 1945 during WWII (that trip to the museum really paid off!).

We'd arrived the afternoon before and arranged some last minute accomodation at the information point in the train station. We got a good deal to stay in Comfort Inn Otemachi, a comfortable double room in a standard hotel (it could have been in any city around the world!) We spent the afternoon in the Peace Park; a park created as a memorial to the A-bomb which is surrounded by a river on either side. We went to the Peace Memorial Museum which stood near the entrance to the park and saw the devastation of the bombing to both the city and it's inhabitants, with scaled models of the city before and after the bombing - certaining a sight to behold.

Once outside the sun was so hot we were dodging from shade to shade through the trees. We walked up to see a memorial placed for a young girl who had survided the bombing only to be diagnosed with lukemia a few years later caused by the radiation. There is a story that says if you make 1000 origami cranes you wish will come true. The girl made cranes, hundreds and hundreds of them, wishing with each tiny crane that she would survive her illness. She made over a thousand cranes but unfortunatly died a while after. Now school children around the country make thousands of paper cranes which are placed in about 10 huge sealed glass boxes standing about 7ft high, 5ft wide and 3ft deep surrounding a statue in memory of the of girl. Thousands and thousands of cranes all wishing for the abolition of nuclear weapons and peace around the world.

The next morning after a birthday breakfast in the hotel of cereal and baked things (mmm, baked things) where i opened my birthday cards (thank you) we made a slow start to Miyajima; a small island about 10 minute ferry ride from Hiroshima. We got on the streetcar (tram) and headed towards the port, we arrived about half an hour later to realise we were at the wrong port and had to get an hour long tram ride all the way to the other side of the bay (doh!)

When we finally got to Miyajima we were starving, (it was about 2.30 in the afternoon) so we went and got some lunch of Okonomiyaki (a mass of noodles, chinese cabbage, beansprouts and pork cooked on a flat griddle in front of you with lots of flair and clattering of spatular things, then placed under a pancake with an egg and weird soy/bbq sauce on top - tastes a lot better than i've described it, trust me :)). We had an ice cream for dessert with chocolate biscuit thing on which we thought would be nice to eat while sitting in the sunshine in a park area - bad choice. There are lots of wild deer around Miyajima and Mark made friends with them quickly as his ice cream melted and all the chocolate bits fell off, one even started to eat his shirt while he was trying to run away from them, ice cream held above his head.

We walked around the coast of the island towards the infamous O'Torii gate and shrine. It would be high tide at 4pm (the best time to see the gate) so we decided to walk round a bit and take in the sights before paying to go into the shrine to see the gate from the, apparently, best view. After seeing the gate we went to an aquarium (they have some weird sort of draw for me - i blame dad) then went to catch the cable car to the top of the mountain to watch the sunset. Unfortunatly the last cable car up the mountain was at 5pm and the last one back at 5.30, we'd missed both, we decided to go back to the O'Torii gate to watch the sunset.

It was beatutiful. The sunset behind the hills surrounding Hiroshima in the distance and with the O'Torii gate in the foreground, it was a photographer's heaven. Mark and I, and apparently the rest of the tourists in Miyajima that day, have the photos to prove it.

When the last traces of light from the sun disappeared we headed back to the ferry and our hotel. For our birthdays Mark and I had decided to buy each other dinner and take it from there. Mark found a restaurant that served yakisoba, a noodle dish (a Fuji Hiro favourite) and gyoza, either Chinese or Japanese dumplings (depending on which country your in they belong to the other - no one wants to claim them!)

After the meal we went for a drink. Bars in Japan are odd to say the least. With little space to spare they cram bars into appartment buildings (where each appartment door opens into a different bar) we found one we thought sounded like it had all we needed 'Cocktails and Drums' unfortunatly the sign was blocked and we realised it was actually 'Cocktails and Dreams'. We tried it anyway. We walked into a tiny, empty (apart from the millions of spirit bottles) bar and a little old lady who didn't speak a word of english beyond 'england' and 'sweet'. There was no menu, therefore no pictures to point at and no phrasebook; it was going to be a interesting night. We decided after trying to ask for rum without successs that I would try a 'sweet' cocktail. Not bad, made with cassis and juice of some sort. After some trying conversation that mostly consisted of silence while she thought up the right word in english (pretty impressive with our immensly poor attempt in Japanese!) She made another and Mark managed to explain, somehow, that it was my birthday. We chatted while she disappeared, returning with two glasses of cava on the house :). Mark, unfortunatly doesn't like cava so I had to drink his - so as not to appear rude of course :P A while later, after the woman had put on a dvd of some Royal Family music event consisting of Elton John and the like, some girls came in and the woman told them it was my birthday, then a glass of 'prum' arrived in front of me, possibly bought by the girls. We eventually worked out it was a type of plum wine, tasty but not like Fuji Hiro's :) We were asked if we wanted to try some (we think) saki. It was ice cold and sweet and tasty - possibly why we think it might not have been saki...

A group of business men entered, order beers and sat smoking cigarettes (no smoking ban here but you can't smoke on the streets in the main parts of town) another guy came in who turned out to be the woman's son and owned the bar. He spoke some english and the woman told him it was my birthday. After he asked my name and got everyone to practice (after being told i was called Nikki-san) the guy pulled out a harmonica and started playing 'happy birthday', the whole bar joined in singing! I sat there grinning like an idiot with no idea what to do. When they stopped i said 'aragato', thank you, a lot and bowed (you get used to it - i'm still bowing now) soon after we went to leave, the owner asked if he could take our picture to putting on the bar's blog. We checked a week after but the blog hadn't been updated.

After Cocktails and Dreams we went to another bar high up in a building over looking a small park and some of the city. Mark insisted i try a cocktail called a grasshopper which tasted exactly like mint-choc-chip icecream (drool). After that we headed home and I promptly fell asleep, luckily waking up without any trace of a hangover :D

It certainly was a birthday I'll remember for the rest of my life :D