Enter Japan

At the EAPSI closing ceremony I heard everyone’s presentations on their Korean summers. We spent equal parts on our actual research and the cultural differences of laboratory work in Korea. I was somewhat surprised at how similar everyone's experience was--labmates working ridiculous hours and encouraging heavy drinking. Such is the real Korean way, it seems.

This was it, our closing meeting in Seoul.

I ended the day at the PC bang with Joe Hagmann playing StarCraft 2 (finally!). I played a bit of the campaign and noticed that the voiceovers and in-movie text were in Korean. Shouldn’t be surprising considering the popularity here, but I also have no idea what happened during the first few missions. We hopped on Battle.net and got a few team games in, winning a few but losing more to those crazy Koreans and their micro skills.

Lipton Tea--free Lineage in-game item with purchase!

Early the next morning we caught a flight to Fukuoka, Japan. From there we traded in for our Japan Rail Pass and took off for Hiroshima. There was still daylight by the time we checked in to the J-Hoppers hostel, so we walked over to the Peace Park and checked out the A-bomb museum. Learning the history of the site was really interesting and informative, though tinged with a bit of that Asian pride that seems to permeate most tourist sites.

A parade display at the Fukuoka airport.

So Japanese. Big-eyed cats in an arm-grabbing vending machine.

Our first meal in Japan! Okonomiyaki, a noodle, meat, and veggie dish on a pancake, Hiroshima-style.

The Peace Park near the detonation site of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

One of the displays from the museum. The ball is where the fat boy detonated.

One of the few standing structures, the Atomic Bomb Dome, hasn't really been touched since 1945.

We spent the next day in Miyajima, an island south of Hiroshima famous for its tori gate and temple. A short train trip and ferry ride has us petting the indigenous deer, thought to represent the health of the nation. We took a rope gondola ride up to the top for some pictures of the bay area, though it wasn’t terribly clear that day.

Packing up from the hostel.

The Miyajima deer were really chill about people being near them.

Miyajima's famous tori gate, leading to the Shinto Itsukushima Shrine.

A view from the top of the island, looking back at the last gondola station.

A 5-tiered pagoda on the island.

The historical sites in Japan are very different from the ones in Korea, even though many of the sites here are also Buddhist temples. The Japanese are also crazy about their vending machines. Unfortunately food is much more expensive than Korea, but converted to dollars it’s probably equivalent to eating out in America.

After spending the day sweating and sightseeing we got back on the train for Kyoto.