Land of the Deer (aka Miyajima Island)

After Peace Memorial Park and a quick lunch in our hotel room (mostly so Egan could crawl and play), we took the trolley to a ferry so we could visit Miyajima Island. 

It turns out that this weekend was also their annual Oyster festival! Again, we were confronted with really wanting to like oysters, but it's not meant to be...

Miyajima is actually named Itsukushima and it's the home of Itsukushima Shrine. It has a "floating" Torii gate, which is one of the most photographed sites in all of Japan. 

We happened to arrive right at low tide...

 A very nice American family took this for us:

 And that's the actual shrine from the water...

 The island has a number of other buildings and sites - this is the 5-story pagoda...

which is right next to the Daiganji Temple. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the outside of the temple...I was too busy laughing at Tim's giant feet in the tiny slippers...

 I'm not sure why, but rice paddles were very prominent on Miyajima and the temple was no exception! There were giant rice paddles, like the one below, all over...

(Of course Wikipedia has the answer! Evidently the monk who invented the paddle lived on the island.)

 Here's are a few vantages from the Shrine...

 You can see the pagoda and temple on the hill behind Tim in the picture below.

 And this is my new favorite family picture! Even Egan was smiling!

I will look for a picture, but Miyajima Island has TONS of deer. And they are not afraid of humans. In fact, the big ol' rats were quite aggressive in their search for food. On more than one occasion, we saw them snatch bags from unsuspecting tourists and follow people who were eating. Tim almost had to help a lady in a wheelchair when the deer went for her backpack - luckily she got away! Of course, there were plenty of people petting and feeding them, but I moved as far away as possible!! Blech! 

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Peace Memorial Park

For our only full day in Hiroshima, I had planned to hit as much of the "big stuff" as possible. For us, that meant visiting the A-bomb dome and the Peace Park and then spending the afternoon on Miyajima Island.

Our hotel, the Rihga Royal Hotel, was literally across the street from the A-bomb dome. It also happens to be the tallest building in Hiroshima. We were on the 24th floor and had an unobstructed view of Hiroshima Castle.

As we walked into the park, the first thing we encountered was the A-bomb dome. This was almost directly below the epicenter of the blast. Amazingly, the structure of the building is still standing. Unfortunately, while we were there they were assessing its structural integrity and so we had to see it with the scaffolding. 

 It's an odd experience visiting places like this - do you smile for pictures? For me, it was important to get pictures with us in them - Egan won't remember this trip, but he will be able to look back and think "I've been there."

Scattered around the park are shrines dedicated to different groups of people. I believe this was specifically for all the children workers who were in the blast area that day. I didn't ever know this, but the Japanese government employed their students to work as part of the war effort. That day, several groups were demolishing buildings to create fire breaks in the event of an air raid. 

This was the children's shrine. Surrounding it are crates stuffed with origami cranes. 

There are literally thousands of cranes in these crates. These chains of folded cranes are sent or brought from all over the world.

 This is the Peace Flame. It's supposed to look like two hands open to the sky. It has burned continuously since 1964 and will continue to burn until there is no more threat of nuclear weapons.

 The Memorial Cenotaph - it contains a scroll with all of the names of those killed by the a-bomb. It sits at one end of the Pond of Peace and you can see several monuments line up through it.

 And this was the museum - it was sobering. Half of the museum was under construction and evidently it was the half that shows the lead-up to the bomb dropping. I think it would have helped to have seen a bit more, because we walked into "the bomb has dropped, people are dead/dying/fatally burned and now the city is on fire." It was a little overwhelming.

We visited a few of the other monuments on our way back to the hotel. Overall, I'm happy we visited and I think it is so important that we have these memorials and reminders of the tragic nature of war. Tim and I have somehow found ourselves on a tour of WWII memorials and I would definitely rank this up there with Auschwitz in terms of the brutal honesty of the exhibit. 

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Valentine's in Hiroshima

This year Valentine's Day weekend also happened to be President's Day weekend, meaning Tim got three days off! We really wanted to visit Hiroshima this trip, so we made reservations, got Shinkansen (bullet train) tickets and were on our way!

First stop: Shinagawa to meet our Shinkansen! Our trip was 4 hours! 

 We passed Mt. Fuji and it was gorgeous!

 Even Egan approved.

There were a lot of notices that this train line was delayed due to snow...

They weren't lying! This was in the Kyoto/Osaka area. Thankfully the "delay" was only a few minutes. We didn't even notice.

We got into Hiroshima around 2:30ish and decided to walk to our Hotel. We were a little distracted trying to find our way, so I didn't get any pictures until that evening. We walked around their large, covered shopping district. Our ultimate goal was Okonomi-mura - it's a three-story building with food stalls that only sell Okonomiyaki. 

Hiroshima is famous for two foods - Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki and Oysters. We don't like Oysters (although we both WISH we did after this trip), but we love Okonomiyaki! There are two pretty distinct styles and we had never tried the Hiroshima-style. 

It starts with a crepe-like layer on the bottom, followed by a very large portion of cabbage, then noodles (soba or udon), your meat, and it's topped with an omelet like egg mixture and teriyaki sauce. 

It was delicious!!! We LOVED the noodles! The other popular style is Osaka-style and it doesn't have noodles and all of the ingredients are mixed together rather than layered. And, yes, that is a big grill for a table. Egan was on my back for most of the meal, but when it had cooled down, he moved to my lap and ate quite a bit of mine. He did such a stellar job eating off the chopsticks!

These ladies ran the food stall we visited and they were just enamored with Egan the whole meal. He was babbling away and they would just chat right back!

Egan was totally passed out by the time we got back to our hotel!

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Busiest Place on Earth??

This past Saturday (2/28) was a beautiful, sunny day in Tokyo. We decided that we would take the train up to Tokyo Disneyland for the evening and see the special "Frozen Fantasy" stuff they have going on throughout the park. 

And that's as far as we got. 

Seriously.

The park was at absolute capacity by 3:00pm. We ended up getting an early dinner at Ikispara - their Downtown Disney equivalent and we were home by 7:00pm. On the plus side, Ikispara was not crowded at all! 

We had friends at the park that day and they told us that ride lines were 3+ hours, food lines were 1+ hour(s) and the bathroom was at least a 30 min. wait. Bummer!

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CupNoodles and Chinatown

One of our first adventures was to the CupNoodles Museum in Yokohama with our friends Eric and Michelle. CupNoodles were invented in the 60s by a poor Japanese man name Momofuku Ando, who (if you believe the museum) is a national treasure in Japan. 

This is one of 3 walls showcasing the history and variety of CupNoodles. There are flavors here I had never heard of - did you know they have seafood curry? Pretty much any flavor you can think of, they've put it into CupNoodles!

My favorite part of the museum was on the 3rd floor. Here we are decorating our OWN CupNoodles! As you can tell, Egan was quite helpful...

 Our finished drawings - Tim and I weren't quite as inspired as Eric & Michelle!

Once you finish decorating your Cup, it's on to the filling and sealing stations. Earlier in our tour (and several times throughout the museum) they tell you how Momofuku revolutionized noodles by filling the cups upside down. We got to crank our cups through the special machine to fill the noodles in correctly. You can also see the toppings station further down. We could do one flavor (seafood, curry, tomato, or original) and four toppings. I believe I added chicken, garlic, green onions, and corn with original flavoring. Tim had cheese in his and did the tomato flavoring!

Here are Eric and Michelle modeling our finished CupNoodles. Yep, they provide a small balloon package to keep it safe during transport!

This was one of exhibits the museum created to demonstrate creative thinking. It's all about perspective!

Momofuku Ando!

After the walking through the museum, we decided to head over to Chinatown. Yokohama has the largest Chinatown in Japan and for some reason we never visited the first time we came! Thankfully Eric and Michelle knew their way around and we feel pretty confident about visiting again in the future.

This large gate is the entrance - it was pretty astounding.

Tim and Egan walking down the street - I don't know if this picture gives a good enough impression of how crowded it was in the street. It was definitely a busy place!

There were hundreds of restaurants and the aroma in the street was delicious! In Japan, many of the restaurants have display cases outside of their menu items. We saw this monstrosity next to a full display case - do you think we could order it??

 And, of course, Chinatown wouldn't be complete without a few beautiful shines sprinkled throughout the area.

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Japan 2015 - We made it!

Hello!

We made it to Japan! Of course, no move across the world come without a few hiccups, but we're all in one piece and things are settling down.
I still need to post Egan's 7 month post and I want to get some pictures of our new place, but I thought I would share our travel-day adventures!

SMALL INTERRUPTION...I totally started this post about three weeks ago. It's taken a while to get into the swing of things! I'm hoping to crank out a few posts tonight while Tim and Egan sleep. 

The Wandering Wells actually left home on December 31st and headed to my parents' house for the New Years celebration/my sister's birthday. I wish I had gotten a picture of my parents' car at our house, but you'll have to believe me when I say it was STUFFED! Egan and I were both holding things on our lap in the backseat. We spent the evening playing games and waiting for midnight.

On January 2nd, we loaded the car back up (with less stuff!) and my parents took us to the airport. Tim and I were crossing our fingers that we would get seats next to each other, but that wasn't in the cards. Our flight was full and we were on opposite sides of the plane...until the desk agent pulled out a little deal for us. For $500 a ticket we could upgrade to business class. Um...WORTH IT! It was our joint Christmas gift and it was seriously THE.BEST.GIFT.EVER.

We weren't next to each other, but Tim was behind my side tray and we could easily move Egan between us. I also had a big floor space next to me where he played for a while and when it was time to nap, we could recline our seats (or lay all the way down!) and snooze! It was absolutely glorious!

For our meals we got to choose between "International" and "Japanese" food. I went for the International menu and Tim choose the Japanese. My first meal was FOUR courses! 

We also had a "order anytime" menu and about 6 hours into the flight I had a delicious bowl of Ramen. Our last "light meal" was only one course, but it was a very good ravioli with chicken. Normally plane food makes me feel sick and constipated, but this was the real deal! I have never felt better getting off the plane!

At one point Tim had taken Egan and I was watching a movie/napping. The lights were turned down and I was feeling pretty good when I realized that one of the flight attendants had Egan and was walking away with him! Of course I was a little startled, but she took him to the kitchen area and, I kid you not, every flight attendant on the plane paid him a visit. She probably held him for 10 minutes! And he spent the entire time flirting and cooing at them. 

Unfortunately (and I'm totally serious) the flight had to end and we arrived at Narita in the afternoon on January 3rd. This began a serious love/hate relationship with our stroller. Because we were the first ones off the plane, our stroller was not at the gate waiting for us. We tried to ask and they pointed down the gangway...so we walked...and then realized that we had left our stroller there. Tim had to go back and get it from the plane, which was quite a ways back. (Hate) BUT because we had a stroller, they let us skip the entire customs line and go through the family gate. (Love) We got our luggage and headed out of the secure area so Tim could check in with the PSNS people and we could get our train tickets. We ended up being the first people on the later train...AKA the train after all our co-travelers. Ugh. So we headed down to the station, which has little barriers set up to keep people from stealing the airport trolleys. They're just small enough that they also keep you from getting a stroller through. (HATE.) Eventually we got on the Narita Express and headed towards our new home. 

Despite the challenges of two large suitcases, a stroller that we had to fold up and carry (Hate) and a myriad of carry-ons (including a Mr. Egan), we got to our place around 7pm. I was so surprised when we walked off the train and straight into our building - it's literally 100 steps from the front door. Check-in was a breeze and we even had some groceries waiting for us. This ended up being EXTREMELY helpful because the next day was a MESS. 

There are no pictures, because I was too busy taking care of an extremely cranky, tired, AND teething baby and a husband who was exploding from both ends. It was not a fun day in the Wells household. 

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