Doei tashi mashdae

best travel buddy ever. I got him to do this for a freakin peice of chocolate with a macadamia in it.

I've been in Japan over two weeks now, but it feels like I've lived a few months worth of adventures since I first stepped off the boat and on to Japans terra firma. My travel buddy and I (aka Ralph, the six feet four or five dude who made me sore from laughing on a regular basis) have seriously had a good time. Luckily it worked out that way since I hardly knew the guy - we met 6 months ago when he came through the city I was living in, Vancouver, which was his first city, and then I got to hang out with him here in Tokyo all these months later in his last city. I honestly thought we had only met once, at one of those hole-in-the-wall establishments littered along Granvle street, but since figuring it all out and remembering where we met, apparently Ralph wasnt even at that place, just his other travel buddy Sophie, and we'd met at multiple other locals; one even being my own home. Whoops, my bad. I 100% put it off to the fact that I had just finished that two month Eastern European trip and had only six weeks to pack up my entire Canadian existance before moving to Korea.

After we stayed in Osaka, we went to Kyoto and the family we stayed with not only cooked up a mean feast, but they had a party as well! It was SO ridiculously fun! There was music being played and sung (one of the girls there is a singer and her friend is the guitarist), breakdancing going down in the middle of the living room, champagne bottles being continuously popped open and the vessels releived of their burdonsom liquids. From there we saw shrines, temples, and the traditional side of Japanese life, and then trained out to Hiroshima, where that very life was blown not just apart, but away, and saw the tattered remains of what was left of the lives that lived there. It was heavy, like you felt Big Boy (the name coined for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) was sitting and staring you down with all the crushed lives and tortured final moments. The hardest part for me was reading the stories of what they went through; what people saw. Stories like mothers yelling a childs name from a bridge where naked young bodies floated by in the crowded river, or how a child with melted skin made her way home after the city was destroyed only to be in excruciating un-quellable pain until she took her last breath in her mothers arms. All the watches were frozen to 8:15, and the shadows of heat were all that was left of others. It was so interesting, the approach that Japan took; not to blame or hate, where most countries would push their side of the story, and talk about the evils of the opposing people group who brought on this attrocity; but instead they were honest about the pains they too inflicted, even having history books from other countries whom they inflicted pain and strife upon, and petitioning that somthing like this; like war; ought to never be an option ever again.