Day 1 in Japan was awesome. I feel like it's gonna be hard to top. We went to Miyajima, and island town about half an hour from Hiroshima. It's famous for having a shrine called Itsukushima, which is built over the water. Well, it's built over the water at high tide, but at low tide the water empties out of the bay and it's over land. And Itsukushima shrine has a famous floating torii, which is also "submerged" at high tide, but you can walk to it at low tide. It's probably one of the most famous sites in Japan, and it's also been called one of Japan's 3 most beautiful views since the 17th century (along with Matsushima, which I visited while on JET, and Amanohashidate, near Kyoto). I've been wanting to come forever, and it definitely lived up to the hype.
The torii at low tide
The torii at high tide
We started the day out with Itsukushima Shrine, which was awesome to visit during high tide. You just walk all over these sort of pier type walkways that make up the shrine, and the water below is so clear and blue. It's a big difference from China, to say the least. All around the shrine there are deer as well, who love nothing more than to steal paper from tourists. Unlike the deers of Nara, which are famous and friendly(ish) and you can buy stuff to feed to, these ones are not as famous and not as cute. The Nara ones are all dappled and well fed. You can't buy stuff to feed these ones, and they all have patchy hair, which leads me to believe that they are starving so they fight each other (hence the patchy hair) and have to resort to theft of tourist maps and tickets to keep themselves fed. They're friendly enough, though, just not at all scared of coming and taking things from you.
After that, we saw another awesome shrine that was built to chant sutras and has all these super old looking carvings and paintings built into the roof. And at the back there's a famous 5 tiered pagoda, that is also really beautiful and will definitely be even more so once the cherry blossoms start blooming. I guess that's just a reason to come back.
Gojuutou, the five tier pagoda
Next on the schedule was climbing a mountain. It was pretty. But it was big. We were tired. The idea was that we'd get to the top and take the cable car down (which happened), but before coming down we'd make Momiji Manju (which didn't happen). Momiji Manju are one of the famous things in Matsushima. They're basically little cakes filled with red bean paste (manju), in the shape of autumn leaves (momiji), and people go crazy for them. Sadly we didn't make it in time to make them, but it was a nice hike with beautiful views of the entire surrounding countryside.
The deer who stole and ate my map.
And, of course, we ate everything. Like, everything. Rei, my friend who came down from Tokyo to travel with me, picked up a Japanese guidebook for us, and a lot of time is given to food recommendations. Japanese are like the original foodies, so it's not surprising. But basically we were told to eat oysters of all kinds, eel rice bowls, and momiji manju. And we did. A lot of all of them. We probably had about 7 meals/snacks today.
Lunch round 1: oysters, complete with torii
Lunch round 2: set with more oysters and eel. Checks all the required boxes.
The entrance to Okonomachi
And to make it even better, we came back to Hiroshima and went to Okonomachi, which is short for okonomiyaki machi, which means okonomiyaki town. If you've never had okonomiyaki, it's one of my favorite Japanese foods. It's kind of like a Japanese pancake, with veggies and meat and all kinds of toppings, and in Hiroshima (which is famous for okonomiyaki) they always do it with a thinner crepe style pancake, bacon and noodles inside. And to know that there is one place that I can go that has three floors of nothing but okonomiyaki restaurants makes me very happy. And going there made me even happier. So now it's been 24 hours in Japan, and already I've had okonomiyaki twice.
Eating my okonomiyaki with the little scoop thing they give you
So far so good. And a good day calls for a good song. Today it's Oya, my favorite track off of Ibeyi's debut, eponymous album,which came out this week. They're twin sisters of French/Cuban descent, and they make really interesting music and harmonize wonderfully together. I'm not gonna lie, a few of the songs on the album are a bit boring, but overall they're really good and very unique. At times they do kind of remind me of Les Nubians at times, which I guess makes sense since they're also French sisters making African influenced soul/R&B. And they percussion is great, which makes sense since their father was a percussionist for Buena Vista Social Club. Anyway, check them out, they're getting a lot of buzz, and I think it's well deserved.
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