What is there to say?

Hiroshima, Japan What a strange set of emotions we have from arriving in this city. First of all, I never ever thought I would be here. I’m old enough to have memories of the aftermath of the atomic bombs we unleashed here. And now we’re in an American hotel, just a 10-minute walk from the hypocenter of the bomb that destroyed this city.

We walked across the Peace Bridge and several monuments before reaching the Peace Memorial Park and the Museum that commemorates that terrible event.

Many groups of school children were here touring. Through the Centotaph for the Atomic Bomb Victims, you can see the Atomic Bomb Dome, on of the few buildings to remain standing, despite being a mile away from the center of the blast.

There are various peace memorials, some from children, some from other countries, and a flame that will burn until nuclear arms are abolished. In other words, not any time soon. The thousands of cranes done by children are particularly touching.

Such a pretty place, and still so sad. We watched a film about the men who volunteered as boys for suicide missions, who survived only because of the bomb on Hiroshima. They were sent to help the victims, and they told of the horrors they saw. Very chilling.

What is startling is that they never refer to America as having dropped the bomb. There is a reference to their failed national policy, which is quite an admission. We’ll visit the museum tomorrow and learn more about how it is dealt with.

I’ll send a few pictures along for now. The hotel is having tech problems. Maybe tomorrow they will be resolved.

Don’s Food Corner

Prior to the train ride here, I stopped in at one of the many stores selling bento boxes and thought I’d give it another go. There were countless versions of these bento boxes. Some looking plain and simple. Others looking fancy — nearly gift-wrapped. But NONE of them gave any idea in English of what could be inside. I scanned Google translate over them so see if the contents could be revealed. Not really. One common translation was “autumn selection.” Seasonal, perhaps, but what could that mean? Finally, I saw that several people were picking up one of the boxes more than others. The Google translate simply said “meat.” Well, at least it wasn’t eel. Or was it? Is eel considered a fish? Or a “meat” that slithers along on the underwater ground? But I’ve only seen beef and pork here in Japan, so I risked it.

It turned out to be pretty good. Very rare slices of beef layered on top of some rice, with a little tasting of pickled ginger and some other small pickled something or other. (Little veggies, I think.)

Later this evening we went to a Chinese restaurant that is in the hotel. I guess it was a pretty fancy place. They had cloth napkins! And it was a little expensive. Little looked familiar to us on the menu. But I ordered some spring rolls and a “chef recommended” dish of pork in sweet and sour sauce. I was a little concerned that the menu said the pork was “direct from Okinawa.” Despite having had some bad experiences with the cuisine of Okinawa, I trusted the chef’s recommendation.

Jo ordered a pumpkin crab soup and chicken with cashews.

I also ordered some rice, but it never showed up.

The way things are served here makes little sense to me. There is no consideration for any particular order of how things come out of the kitchen or whether everyone is being served food at the same time. So, things got to the table in a piecemeal and random pace. Jo’s soup showed up. About ten minutes later, her chicken arrived. Then, the spring rolls appeared, closely followed a few seconds later by the pork from Okinawa.

The smallish plate of the pork came along with an even smaller plate. This came with a set of silver serving utensils. I was supposed to take some pork from the bigger plate and put it onto the smaller plate? I’m not sure why, but I did it. Sadly, I would have liked some rice with this. The sweet and sour sauce for the pork was really excellent as were the spring rolls, the crab soup and the chicken dish. But clearly we were doing something wrong in the way we ate all this.

I watched a nearby table of six people and they too kept getting dishes brought out in what seemed to me to be a haphazard manner. A few people got multiple dishes at the same time. Others sat there staring at the food of others until eventually something arrived for them.

A guy sitting at the table next to us also had a dish that featured a sauce like the sweet-and-sour sauce I had on the pork. Without rice underneath that sauce, how do you capture it? I saw the guy on the next table scoop out sauce from his big plate and put it on his little plate. Then, he tried to eat that sauce with chopsticks, continually dipping the chopsticks into the sauce! You can’t get a lot of sauce on the tips of chopsticks, but he persevered. I did not and ended up leaving most of that great sauce on the plate.

I’m sure I’ll get the knack of this one day. Yes, I’m very, very sure.