Our Japan trip (part 3 - Hiroshima and goodbye)

The Bomb Dome was located at Peace Memorial Park. This was a beautiful park symbolizing peace as well as the effects of nuclear war. It was really something. Apparently the dome was the only building left standing after the bomb was dropped. I guess the physics bombing indicate that the place of least impact is closest to the bomb itself because the bombs explode from inside out. Not sure how it all works but the dome was very close to where the bomb was dropped and it was the only building that survived the blast (at least partially). Hiroshima maintains this dome to keep it looking exactly as it did after the bombing. It was quite a sight. There is a large bridge near the dome that is shaped like a large "T". It was apparently the bombing target.
Since it was in the evening, we were too late to see the museum. It was too bad we couldn’t see the museum. I had been told that it was magnificent. But we took a stroll through the park and by a very large structure which at first we couldn’t figure out. It looked like a large fish tail with a fire pit in the middle, and the other end about 40 yards had a dome shape. But when we walked further down the sidewalk and looked back at it. It looked like a mushroom cloud with fire in the middle symbolizing the bomb. It was neat.
We had a bit of time and we were hungry so we searched for a sushi bar. We couldn't come to Japan and not have sushi! Lucky for us, people were friendly enough to walk us to a nearby sushi bar. It was really cool and really expensive. One peice of basic veggie sushi goes for 50 cents a peice. The good stuff goes for $2.50 and up for one peice. I guess Japanese people don't eat much cuz we would have to spend over $30 each to satisfy our hunger. But we weren't there for a meal, and I assume most people aren't. It's a hangout.
We didn't know what to order so we tried the eel, burnt salmon, and octopus legs. The eel was amazing! (eel in the picture) The salmon was good, and the octopus legs were blah. We also ordered some Sake (sa-key). Sake is a traditional Japanese drink like Soju is traditional Korean. The Sake came warmed and was actually quite nice. Overall, the sushi experience was cool, and the sushi bar guy was pretty patient with us taking forever to order. I like sushi, but I'm not a huge fan. I would definitely return for some eel if I could!
After that it was time to say goodbye. We took Chris to the train station so he could catch his night bus to Osaka. From there we would fly back home. We hung out for a bit at the station and said our goodbyes to Chris. We knew the trip would eventually come to an end, but we sure didn’t want it to. But this was goodbye time, the unavoidable end of our adventures in Japan. Chris was set to sleep on the bus to Osaka and we still had to go and find a place to sleep.
We thought we might as well try a different ryoken this time so we navigated our way to an area with about 4-5 of them. They weren’t what we had hoped for, but it was late and we were tired. It ended up being a basic room like the other night but for a higher price. We didn’t mind though, we were ready to crash.
We knew we didn’t have 7-8 hours to get back to Fukuoka in the morning so we were going to take the expressway no matter what the tolls were. I figured out how to get the expressways back on the GPS and we went to fill up the car for the journey home. It appeared we had only spent $30 bucks in gas so far. Wow! I guess we hadn’t driven very fast, but were still amazed!
At the gas station I decided to try and communicate to the gas attendant to help me set my navigation point to the Mazda Rental company. This was quite confusing for us both. He ended up playing around with the system for about 10 minutes before I realized that you can type in phone numbers to get destinations. So I pulled out a copy of the registration and showed him the phone number. It was as easy as pie! Why didn’t we think of that before! Anyway, we were set to go. We just had to follow the GPS all the way back.
It was raining the entire drive back. It was still really nice on the expressways, but the rain made it a bit gloomy. I wasn’t sure how the expressway tolls worked until we got there. We ended up going through a ticket booth upon entering the expressway. I almost drove away without realizing the ticket popping out. We had to reverse and pull it out. Ha! Basically after that we just kept driving down the expressway no problem. That is until we got a flat tire about 15 minutes outside of Fukuoka. Yeah, a flat. I could have guessed it would happen, and I knew the policy stated that the costs were on me, but his tire wasn’t just flat, it was torn. So that sucked! But changing the tire was no big deal, I’d had enough flat tires tree planting that I knew where to find everything.
After I changed the tire we made it back to Mazda okay. We actually mad the trip in 3 hours. We cut the trip in more than half. It’s no wonder that people are willing to pay the tolls, which turned out to be 7,100 Yen ($71). Not as bad as I had been told at the info booth. They had said anywhere between 10,000-13,000 Yen ($100-130). So I was happy. Didn’t matter though, the tire ended up costing me another $75 bucks anyway. Bummer!
From there it was smooth sailing. I mean, no it wasn’t, it was terrible sailing! The ferry was rocking all over the place for 3 hours straight. Christine and I tried not to think about how sick we felt and tried to watch the movie. We were feeling terrible. What a bumpy ride that was. It must have been windy.
We got back to Busan and had to take the subway for 45 minutes to get to the bus terminal. From there we took a bus back to Ulsan. It was good to be home. . . sorta. We didn’t want our trip to end. It was a lot of fun. But now it was back to the grind.

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