Japan Days 2 and 3- Koyasan, Hiroshima, and Osaka

Sorry it has been a while since I last posted. I did what I could on the ship between Japan and China, but with two days to do schoolwork, planning for Shanghai AND needed to have some sort of a life, it wasn’t easy to find the time to blog. However, I make sure to write down everything I can in a journal as I go from city to city (during down time on trains and buses) so it is not like I am solely recapping everything based on fuzzy memories. So far, we have been to 3 ports, passed the 1/3 of the way done with the trip line, and seen SO MUCH that I can’t even imagine how travel overloaded I will be by the end of the trip. I have to remind myself every day that I am in these countries and doing these incredible things because it doesn’t feel real. It is such an amazing opportunity and I am so so appreciative to be able to travel the way that I am. It has been such an incredible journey thus far and I am wishing I could do this for years instead of months. I am seeing things and meeting people that are opening my eyes to the world already, and we haven’t even hit the countries that are known for creating that kind of feeling. We all talk about every day how lucky we are to be able to be on SAS. I can honestly say that my expectations started off really high, and they have been surpassed to unimaginable heights, and that is a pretty fair consensus with the rest of the ship. It is so hard to believe that it has been over a month and that we have only gone to three places since it feels like years and thousands of places. I am not doing this justice since my writing skills are not that impressive and what I am feeling is so hard to put into words. But honestly, this is the greatest semester I could have asked for already.

Anyway, enough of that and more of what I have been doing these past 2 weeks… I can’t believe that it was only 2 weeks now that I am writing it out. This morning feels like days ago, and Japan, which was only 10 days ago, feels like years and years away. Anyway, I left off at leaving for Koyasan, Japan day number 2.

I spent about 2 hours in the Tokyo train station by myself, first trying to meet up with some friends to go to Koyasan, and then realizing that we were missing a person and waiting for her. It is really really hard to travel with people when we don’t all have phones. I don’t know how people ever did it. A few things that someone should know if traveling in Japan- DO NOT SIT ON THE FLOOR. The floor is where homeless people sit and homeless people only. Luckily, I was just joined by a man who was trying his hardest to speak English and was amused by Nemo and my little computer (I was watching Finding Nemo). I got up fairly quickly and walked away. There were no chairs anywhere though so that was sad. I have a friend who I later learned sat down in the station a different day and someone yelled at them for doing it. These are things that it would have been nice to have been told at our hour and a half long preports instead of some common sense things that people who are going to do them will do regardless of their warning (example: chase hard liquor with beer). Eventually, my friend arrived at the station, we got a quick breakfast and got on our very first Japanese bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka.

The bullet trains are pretty amazing. They are extremely comfortable, travel incredible fast, and are a very easy way to travel around Japan. My friend and I had gotten a rail pass- which is basically a flat rate pass that allows you to take unlimited trains around Japan for a set amount of days- it is meant for tourists and you have to buy to out of the country. It definitely made our few days run smoothly we were able to see a lot more than all of our friends without the passes. I spent a lot of the time on the trains staring out the window, and even though we were spending a lot of time sitting on trains and buses, we were able to see a lot of the country that no one really visits (like a lot of the small towns we passed through). The speed that we were going though was kind of like a plane right before it takes off. I kept waiting for us to lift up in the air. The first train ride was the most exciting because since all we had seen was Tokyo, I didn’t feel like I was getting a good taste of what Japan is really all about. I felt like I was just in a big city back home and that’s not what I wanted from the trip. So, as we passed by all the Japanese-style homes and the countryside I was very excited. When we got to Shin-Osaka, we needed to buy tickets for the subway to Namba. It took us a few different tries for someone to tell us where to find where the machines were. After the subway, we got on a train from Namba to Koya-san. Coincidentally, when we got on the train there were 6 other SAS kids there that were going to the same Buddhist Monastery as we were! It was nice to travel from there on out with more than just my friend and I. From Namba you have to take two trains, a cable car and a bus in order to get to the temple. It is literally in the middle of nowhere- on a big mountain. It was absolutely beautiful getting there though, and very exciting.

When we finally arrived at the temple we first got to eat dinner. [Fun side note: We were wearing these slippers all over the monastery, and then would take them off to go into each room. For the bathrooms though, they had bathroom slippers.] So, we were eating on the ground with this huge incredible feast in front of us. It was colorful and I had no idea what any of it was, but it looked interesting. I tried some of everything, which was shocking for even me. I didn’t really like much of it, but at least I wasn’t left wondering. When I described dinner in my journal immediately after I ate (I am looking at it now), I used the word interesting 3 times in 3 lines of writing. After eating, we got to tour around the monastery, which was extremely quiet and serene, and then we went to take a tour of the grounds aka cemetery. The cemetery that we toured is the biggest Buddhist cemetery in Asia, with over 400,000 people buried in it over many centuries. It was absolutely fascinating. We learned about some of the traditions, customs and legends and got to see some incredible statues, graves and monuments. The monk that was showing us around was also telling us about his sect of Buddhism. The only word that I can really describe it as is modern- they have electricity including televisions and internet, go out to clubs, and are allowed to marry and have children. It was really different than my former impression of what monks are.

On the grounds was the main “house of worship”. The story behind it is that the founder of the sect lives in the house, so they bring him food twice a day and pray over there. The different decorations surrounding the area were beautiful- they had gold flowers and lanterns lining the temples. The lanterns are actually bought by the family of a dead relative, and it is 2 million US dollars for one but means that the dead will be prayed for eternally. We did a lot of bowing and prayer saying and such as we walked through the grounds and that was definitely interesting. At the house of the founding monk, the monk that was showing us around sung a sutra, which he later told us was the most popular one in Asia. The meaning of the sutra was that everything in peoples lives are void; that all the more material things (difference between rich and poor) mean nothing. I don’t describe it quite like he did but I really like the meaning- I may just become a monkess (those exist) if you haven’t picked up on that yet. One other interesting fact of the night was that the only thing that they bury in Buddhist cemeteries are the throat bone because it looks like a Buddha. The rest of their bodies are cremated and put elsewhere. The final thing that I did that night was use one of the Buddhist baths. It was incredibly relaxing- basically a hot tub. After walking around with my backpack all day and being in pain it felt amazing.  I then put on the robes that they provided us, which were extremely comfortable and was very, very happy sitting around there hanging out with my friends. The beds were also incredibly comfortable and I fell asleep that night in no time.

At 6:30 the next morning, we all started waking up for the service and fire ceremony. It took forever for us all to get out of bed because we were all really comfortable and it was SO SO cold outside. Eventually I pulled through and did it, but was wearing a LOT of layers. We made our way to the main temple for the service, which was really interesting. The temple was absolutely beautiful and the entire service was fascinating. Then, we went to a different place for the fire ceremony which was very different from the basic chanting in the first service. There was one monk banging on a drum, while the other one was completely different movements with beads and fire and blocks of wood. It was very exciting and loud, which was surprising because up until that point everything that we experienced in the monastery was incredibly quiet.

Following the fire ceremony, we went to eat breakfast, which was once again interesting. Then, my friend Elena and I rushed to get our stuff and catch a bus that would take us to the cable car since we were headed to Hiroshima that day. One of the two trains that we took back to Namba was only 2 cars- it was so crazy seeing such a tiny train. We got to Osaka at lunch time and since we had about 45 minutes until our train we went on a search for sushi. Even in a restaurant area filled with 30 or so eateries, it was SO difficult to find sushi. Our former impressions of Japan being filled with sushi everywhere were completely off. We eventually found one place that had two or three sushi dishes so we decided to go there. They couldn’t speak any English so we ordered solely relying on hand gestures and hoping that what we were eating wouldn’t kill us. I got a platter that had 3 different colors of sushi- green, pink and yellow. It looked pretty more than anything else. I really clearly have become a good eater since I literally just took a bite of all of it having no idea what it was. Due to these new eating skills, it took me about half a second after my first piece to discover that the sushi had wasabi inside it. I have never felt like a weird burn from food- I could feel it in my nose. We finished our meal and quickly headed to our train. Due to some sign confusion, we literally got on the train as the doors were closing.

When we arrived in Hiroshima at around 3, we first needed to find a desk since we were really just winging it and had no idea where exactly we were going. There were two places that they recommended going, but since it was late we had to choose one. (Between the Memorial Peace Park and floating gates, so we chose Peace Park since that was really what we came for even though we knew that the gates were supposed to be cool). The park was both touching and horrifying and I was incredibly ashamed to be an American and incredibly impressed with how the Japanese have taken a horrific event and created something magnificent from it. There was a mixture in the park of memorial structures and peace monuments that signified and instructed how peace is important and should be spread throughout the world. We went into the remembrance hall, which especially reminded me of the Holocaust Museum. There was a dome-shaped room that had tiles lining the walls for every person that had perished from the bomb. In the center of the room, there was a structure that represented the people who were in the A-Dome at the time of the bombing. (The A-Dome is the building that the bomb was dropped directly on top of and that because of the materials it was made of, is still standing today with the inside of it completely missing.) While I loved the general encouragement of peace that was found all over the park, my favorite part of it was the paper cranes found everywhere. I remember in sixth grade we completed a paper crane project with my social studies class in honor of Hiroshima. I relearned the story when I visited the city. I would prefer that you google it since I do not want to mess it up, as it is an incredible touching story. Anyway, these paper cranes were literally found all over the park, in chains and patterns and there was even an entire huge exhibit that was made of the cranes. It was amazing. We headed back to the train station after a few hours at the park. After a fairly quick train ride, we arrived back in Osaka station for the third time in approximately 24 hours.

When we got to Shin-Osaka, we met up with our friends who were getting in coincidentally at the same time from Tokyo. We were all staying at a hostel together that night, so we walked for a while in the subway station and then took two subways to get into downtown Osaka where the station was. We found our way to the hostel after a little, which ended up being an apartment that someone used as a hostel- there was only one other person staying there so we literally had an apartment to ourselves for the night. The other person was awesome, he was from Australia (as were so many people that we met there, since it is their summer break) and he ended up coming out with us that night. Since it was already fairly late, and we were hungry, we got ready quickly and left to go get food and drinks. Osaka is basically known for its nightlife- it is a young city, so that was really all we knew there was to do there. We searched for food for a while, but since it was already so late it was hard to find a place that was open.  We ended up at some hole in the wall place that was down a maze of alleyways (we discovered during our time in Asia so far that the best places are the most randomly located). It was an incredibly interesting dinner. It was hibachi style, and we basically just a ordered shrimp or pork dish (I don’t know how my friends who are keeping kosher are doing it) and they started cooking away. First, there was eggs, rice and a bunch of vegetables cooking, then they added the shrimp or pork, the there was more eggs, then ketchup, mustard, mayo, sweet sauce, spicy sauce, and some other toppings that I am not sure what they were(you could pick and choose your toppings). It was delicious, but I could feel my arteries clogging as I ate it. But hey, when in Japan…

Afterwards, we found a karaoke place, which was a lot of fun. We spent some time there and then walked around in this street area that had a bunch of shops and restaurants, but couldn’t really find places to go. At this point we decided that we had an apartment to ourselves for a night, it was late, and we should just go back and hang out there. It was perfect. I got to skype Lorrie and Amy and was really excited about that, as well as upload a bunch of photos. Then I went to sleep!

So, there is Koyasan, Hiroshima and Osaka in a nutshell—or a 4 page word document. Happy Dad??