Hiroshima and Fukuoka

Next stop is Hiroshima, when I saw that it was along the way on the train west I felt like I had to see it for myself and to respect the history of the city.

I got a Ekiben, which is a lunchbox they sell at the train stations to eat on the trains. I've seen some that had pull tabs to cause the meal to heat up. This was so much food, there's a second layer of rice under there.

I went to the museum and memorial there but I didn't take any pictures. It was pretty rough, I couldn't even look at the photographs for very long. This building was one of the only buildings that survived. It was really wild to see a bustling city before me and to know that nothing was there after the devastation and that all of these buildings were at most 50 years old. This city now has a super convenient monorail system so I guess they got to plan the city around that when they rebuilt.

I took the ferry over to Miyajima which was much larger than Enoshima but kind of had similar things. I got there a bit late for most of the shops because I had to stop at the hotel and the museum. I got a few nice things there though and then had to make sure to make the last ferry off the island. There's an Okonomiyaki mall in Hiroshima where it was basically like 20 Okonomiyaki spots in one building. Problem was there were probably 15 seats at most at each place and they were all taken and one place did reservations for some reason. So I waited in line at a highly rated Okonomiyaki restaurant to try Hiroshima style Okonomiyaki. Most places around the world only serve Osaka style so I wanted to see what Hiroshima's was like. Basically Hiroshima style the ingredients are layered instead of mixed in and has yakisoba noodles as one of the layers. It was a lot of food and the Hiroshima Cola was what I'd imagine Sarsparilla to taste like.

Next stop was Fukuoka and everything would've been more than perfect this trip if I didn't lose my JR pass on the transit over. Spent a few hours seeing if it was at the lost and found or if it was left on the train. Anyway this was my first meal in Fukuoka, the style of ramen at this place had bits of fat in the broth to enhance the flavor. Everything was good.

I walked over to the popular mall and there were a few things happening around there. Some of these malls had whacky experience venues to check out. This one had a haunted house thing inside their arcade so you could just hear teenagers screaming bloody murder every once in a while. This arcade had a whole Gundam team vs team setup but it was during a downtime.

I hopped on the bus to get to a fancier mall which had this big Gundam statue in front of it. This place had a pretty large Gundam shop. Almost every Gundam shop I saw had huge lines but this one seemed to more of a museum style. I got ice cream, cheese cake and their popular 'cheese cookie' from Tokyo Milk Cheese Factory.

I took the bus back towards my hotel which was in the area with these iconic Fukuoka Yatai (food stalls) but most of them had huge lines. These stalls are all mobile, none of them were there in the afternoon and some of them had like 5 or more workers manning them. This coffee bar one looked so fancy in comparison but that one must've been trucked in already assembled. I managed to get a seat at one and got yakisoba and some other small dish. There's also an Asahi brewery that was along the way to my destination but I ran out of time so I at least had an Asahi. It tasted so different.

Back to Tokyo for a bit.