By Chris
November 12, 2019 • 2 min read
November 8-11, 2019
We only stayed 3 nights in Hiroshima, with one day dedicated to the Peace Museum, and the second day for Okunoshima (Bunny Island).
The above picture is of the Atomic Bomb Dome, which was close to the hypocenter. Across the water was the museum, which was well done but a very sobering and sad experience. I was definitely wiping away tears and regretting my eyeliner that morning. The last time I visited this museum was over 20 years ago as a kid when I visited Japan with my mom, grandma, and grandpa.
We, of course, visited the Sadako statue, which commemorates a young girl who died of leukemia from the radiation, and who tried to fold a thousand paper cranes in the hopes of getting better. School children still leave many cranes at this memorial. As a kid, I remember dressing up as Sadako for a class presentation and trying to fold cranes.
The next day we took several trains and then a ferry to Okunoshima Island, aka "Rabbit Island" due to the 400+ rabbits who live there now. It used to be "off the maps" during world war II due to the development of poison gas on the island. Now there's a museum there about this, but also so many rabbits it's a tourist attraction. There are a couple competing legends about the rabbits' origins: escapees from the gas experiments, versus rabbits who got left there by school kids.
We got a pretty late start and didn't realize the ferry stops at lunchtime, so we arrived pretty late in the day after the bunnies were already pretty full. Despite this, they were awfully cute. In true Chris fashion, I had gone overboard and bought a TON of veggies and spent an hour cutting them up the night before, only to find very full rabbits lounging around lol. Brandon heroically carried the very heavy bag. We still got to feed some of them though.
They favored the red lettuce over the carrots. If you do go, peel the carrots into thin strips using a peeler because it takes them FOREVER to eat things. They reminded us of tiny vacuum mouths, consuming at such a steady munch munch rate, sucking up the strips of carrot or lettuce.
Overall we enjoyed our short time in Hiroshima very much. We also visited our first Japanese grocery store "Spark" and this was the start of our grocery journey that we'll continue in the next post dun dun dun.
January 25th to February 20th After our brief stay in Singapore, we more or less spent the next month (from January 25th to February 20th) on various Thai islands. It was a blast and a really unique experience. Looking back on it I'm probably struck the most by how different the experience was on each of the islands. We also had some interesting experiences getting to and from the different…