Osaka, Hiroshima, Miyajima, and Kyoto - JAPAN

I've returned from a whirl-wind tour of Osaka, Hiroshima, Miyajima and Kyoto, Japan. I left last Friday night and returned late Wednesday; since returning, I've been very busy with school work and law school applications, so I have not had time to write on my blog, but I'm making time now, because I want to report on some of the beautiful sites I was able to see over the past week. I landed on Friday night around eight o'clock and took a bus directly from the airport in Osaka to Kyoto, Japan. I was immediately struck by two things, on being high prices of Japan from a bottle of water to a 45 minute bus ride, everything was very expensive (it's the most expensive country in the world.) I was also struck by how efficient Japan is compared to Korea or the United States. The country was incredibly clean and everything was very structured and maneagable; I guess it has to be that way considering all of the people. So when I arrived in Osaka, I waited in the "B"-line beneath a blinking light that said exactly when the next bus would be arriving to take me to Kyoto and exactly when we would be arriving in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English. When I arrived in Kyoto I met my friend Sara, who is a Fulbright English teacher in Gwongju in southwest Korea. We waited to board an 11:30 pm overnight bus to Hiroshima (we took two night buses during the five days in Japan in order to save money on night accomodations.) At 6 am we arrived in Hiroshima and went to get some food. We found a 24 hour restaurant which seemed to be the Japanese version of a Furr's Cafeteria. We had a great breakfast, complete with an Asahi beer, and started our day in the Peace Memorial Park, which looked beautiful in the early morning. We had already been walking around for a couple hours when the museum finally opened at 8:30 and we were some of the first visitors to enter for the day. The museum was sad and intriguing at the same time, especially in light of the current news surrounding North Korea's nuclear weapons testing. The aftermath and effects of the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima were horrific, and the Japanese did a great job of talking about the tragedy in a non-biased way, including the role that they played in World War II. In the afternoon we stumbled upon a food festival at a nearby palace and headed to an island about an hour's train ride and a 30 minute ferry ride form Hiroshima; the island was called Miyajima and is the site of a famous Itsukushima shrine that stands in the water near the shore of the island (apparently one of the most photographed sites in Japan.) Upon arrival we swam out into the water around the shrine, it was a fall day, but the water was quite warm. I think we were fulfilling the stereotype of the "crazy American tourists" as we were the only ones swimming; however, we know it was allowed, because we had seen pictures of people swimming in the summertime around the shrine. That night we had a picnic dinner of foods that we had picked up from a local 7-11 (it really was a 7-11) and beer from a vending machine next to the water, and the village was lit along with the shrine; we felt like the only ones on the island. The next morning we set out to climb the tallest mountain on the island, about 600 meters high and see the shrine at the top. When we got back down the mountain we took the next ferry to the mainland and caught a bus to a nearby hot springs. It was a refreshing way to end a great day and just in time before we boarded another night bus, headed back to Kyoto. We arrived in Kyoto the following morning at 5:30am and curled up on the floor of the bus station for a few more hours of much needed sleep. The day in Kyoto was packed with site-seeing, but the sites were great. We ended the day on the famous geisha street where we saw a few real live geishas. We decided to move onto Osaka that night and checked into an inexpensive hotel. Osaka was an incredibly modern city where just the fashion alone was a sight to see. I could've spent hours people watching, but we didn't have the time. We saw the Osaka Castle, went to the Peace Center, a huge electronics street that sold everything you could imagine, did some shopping in the famous shopping/entertainment district, and went to a huge spa called Spaworld where each tub was named and themed like a different country. I returned to Jeju Island late Wednesday night feeling very refreshed despite the fast pace of my trip to Japan!