Miyajima

Along with our friends Jeff and Ted, Joel and I took a day trip to Miyajima - one of the three most sacred/spiritual/religious places in all of Japan. It's half way between Iwakuni and Hiroshima, so it's only a 23 minute train ride away from us. We decided to go on Oct. 10th, since it was Columbus Day and therefore a federal holiday, thinking it wouldn't be that busy as the Japanese really have no reason to celebrate this day with us Americans. HOWEVER, it turned out to coincide with "Sports Day" which is a national Japanese holiday. Who knew? So it was quite busy, but AMAZING none the less!

Here's a sample of what the train schedules look like here. We're getting the hang of it now.

A map of Miyajima Island.

Basically, you hop off the train and roll out into a cute downtown area where you have to take tunnels under the road to cross over to the other side of the street. Straight ahead is the ferry which takes you to Miyajima island, only about a 15 minute ride across the water.

You can kinda see the oyster beds in the water. It's oyster season and oh how glorious it is!

The mountains here are simply stunning. Miyajima is known for the giant Torii Gate that was built out in the water. During low tide, you can walk under it, but we got here when it was still a little too deep. The Torii Gate is a symbol in the Shinto religion. Whenever you see one, you know you are about to enter some sort of shrine.

A view of the Torii Gate from the ferry.

Once we docked, we were able to walk straight through the super cute, historic downtown of Miyajima Island. There were SO many bakeries and places to eat! It was overwhelming! Joel and I ordered octopus tentacles and squid balls (dough balls, folks, don't get nasty!) from 2 local vendors.

I took the picture after we had eaten the really cool looking part of the tentacle!

Take note: deer are sacred in Miyajima. Therefore, they are the pigeons of the park. They were EVERYWHERE and so people friendly! They would snatch your food when you weren't looking (one successfully ate the wax paper from my squid balls) so you had to hold things high and keep looking over your shoulder for the little buggers.

Don't let the cuteness fool you. They were not soft and fluffy like Bambi. I definitely had to sanitize my hands after contact!

My fellow substance abuse counselor, Jeff, was very helpful in reminding me to keep my food elevated.

Moving on: We hiked over to the main shrine by the HUGE Torii Gate and learned that due to the sacred nature of the island, back in the day, they were not permitted to build anything on the land. So, they found a loophole and built everything over the water. The entire shrine was on posts, and during high tide it looks like you're in floating buildings. The construction was AWESOME.

Obviously NOT high tide at the moment.

There's that Torii Gate! Folks were starting to walk out toward it but couldn't quite make it yet.

There are a lot of Chinese influenced elements in Japan, especially with regard to the Shinto and Buddhist religions.

Next, we hiked up to a Buddhist temple. It was SO beautiful! Whoever comes to visit us here will be making a trip to Miyajima with us, specifically this temple. The setting is so serene and even if you aren't Buddhist, you feel close to God due to the simple beauty of your surroundings. I'm just going to post a bunch of pictures that depict several of the mini-shrines as well as the gorgeous scenery. Sadly, pictures cannot do this place justice.

Creepy.

The road up to the Temple.

The statues on either side were really big.

The little stone statue at the bottom of the pic was everywhere and he was different every time. Sadly, it reminded me of Stewie Griffin so I couldn't take it seriously. :-p

The car is a bit out of place. Hmmmm....

Postcard worthy.

HA!

Winnie the Pooh was a tad out of place. Still haven't figured this one out.

We picked a local restaurant to eat at that was grilling fresh oysters right outside the front door. Of course we ordered them as our appetizer, along with fried oyster curry and broiled oyster kaki don. These oysters are not your normal oyster. They are HUGE. And they are TASTY. And they are MEATY. Wow. Words cannot express.

Jeff's fried oysters.

Finally, we stopped at the Fish Doctor for a little foot work. Now, for those of you that know I hate feet, this was really hard but oh my goodness, was it fun! These fish love to eat dead skin. So we all paid for 7 minutes of foot work from the fish. Not kidding - all of us felt smooth and refreshed after our time was through!

Bleh! Feet! But I wanted y'all to see what we did!

Lastly, after a fabulous day in Miyajima, I will leave you with a bit of randomness:

An ad outside a restaurant that we found funny. Beer doesn't make us make this face unfortunately, LOL.

Don't do this with your chopsticks. Bonus points to those that know what this means to the Japanese.

Our New Home!

Here are some pictures of our new house! It's furnished with temporary furniture that we've borrowed from the base as our stuff probably won't be here until sometime in November. Enjoy the pictures.

We need to have 5 trash cans in the kitchen to comply with the recycling system here in Iwakuni! The two large cans are for combustibles and plastics. The other three small bins are for aluminum cans, glass bottles and plastic bottles. We have a 20 page document explaining how it all works!

View of our kitchen and refrigerator.

Our mini-dishwasher!

Our glass top oven is really great. It comes complete with a touch screen to adjust the temperature of the burners. The only downside is that it only takes special pots/pans that have a magnetic bottom! Luckily we found some in a closet that we left behind! There is also an oven drawer that pulls out. It's not big enough to bake in, but we were able to cook two good sized steaks in it with no problem.

This is our storage cabinet for dishes, pots/pans etc. It is motorized so when you push the down button it lowers! The bottom of the shelf even has holes in it so the dishes can be put away wet and it will catch the water.

Living Room with temporary couch and kitchen table. We've got our laptop and Wii setup to our new TV, but we're stuck with only DVD's right now as our internet won't be connected until Oct. 19th.

This is our formal dining room. It is designed in the traditional Japanese manner with Tatami mats, sliding rice paper walls and large closets.

This is the front door and foyer area. The floor is lower when you walk in so you can take off your shoes and store them in the closet. They are serious about the new shoes policy, it's written into our lease!

Shoe closet: I brought three pairs of shoes and Kirk brought 15!

Shower room.

Shower door.

Fancy toilet with many buttons. It even warms the seat for you in the winter and flushes for you if you're not quick enough!

Remote controls to work the heater/AC wall units in each room. Thanks to the housing department we have instructions in English on how to use them.

This is a video intercom system that looks out of our front door. It comes on when someone rings our door bell.

Stairs.

Upper stairs bedroom. This will probably be a guest room.

Walk in closet with temporary dressers.

Master bedroom.

This is our view out of our bedroom window.

Our neighbors that live behind us. If you look closely you can see a graveyard in the distance.

A nice view of the mountains in the distance.

Day Trip to Hiroshima

So how do you like this, two blog posts in two days! Today Kirk and I met up with her co-worker Jeff who lives in Hiroshima and graciously offered to show us around the city and take us to some of his favorite spots. Luckily we had a crash course on how to use the train system here during our cultural indoctrination, so today we had no problems finding the Iwakuni station and getting on the right train. The ride to Hiroshima took us along the coast and made multiple stops in the towns along the way, taking about 50 minutes total.

We met Jeff outside of the station and first we went to the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum was featuring the Yoko Ono 2011 exhibit, as she was given the Hiroshima Art Prize for using her art to inspire peace.

Next we walked over to Peace Park, which is a war memorial for the atomic bomb that was dropped in 1945. The building in the picture below is the only structure remaining in the original state after the bomb was dropped. The second picture is the memorial arch, which was built with line-of-sight to the building above.

Next we set off on our trek towards Jeff's favorite restaurant and on the way walked through Hondori St., which is a covered street with lots of shops and restaurants. There was a clothing store named "Womb", which Kirk had a negative reaction to and will thus not be shopping there :).

The restaurant we went to specializes in serving Okonomiyaki, which is a little hard to describe as I have never in my life had anything close to this before, but here it goes. It is basically a crepe with cabbage on top that is fried and topped with egg, prawns, squid, scallops, bacon and scallions and a Japanese BBQ sauce.

On our way back through the mall from the restaurant we came across a live rock band playing, made up of five young Japanese girls. I have to admit their music was pretty catchy despite not understanding any of the words.

So that concludes our first day trip to Hiroshima city. We were so lucky to have a great tour guide to show us around and help us learn the lay of the land. We will definitely be making more trips north like this in the future!

Oh, but wait! Kirk wants you to see this:

She successfully navigated the "squatting toilet" at the Art Museum. Good Job Honey.

New House, New Car, Yuu Beach, and More

Alrighty, so we picked a house! And it's NOT the one we posted pictures of! LOL! We will get better pics when we move in this Thursday and Friday, but until then, here's a couple of pictures of the outside of the house and the view from our driveway. We will be given temporary furniture from the base until our household shipment arrives, probably in November.

God is good. We decided not to take our chances and rather jump on a house that we really like now. Turns out, it's in a great area with close proximity to lots of stores, restaurants, and of course, work. We have a miniature yard, 2 toilets (rare!), and 2 driveways with space for at least 3 cars (super rare!). We LOVE IT!

We also bought our car! BIG RED as we like to call him. He is a 2003 Mitsubishi Colt. Drives like a champ and is easy to spot in parking lots.

Today, we were brave enough to venture out to town all by ourselves! Both Joel and I took turns driving and I think we did a fabulous job! We figured out how to get to Yuu Beach which is about 25 minutes away from base, and under 15 minutes away from our house. Beach season is over for the Japanese (meaning you're not allowed to swim in the water any more this season), despite the fact it was a GORGEOUS Saturday today, about 80 degrees (in October!) and sunny as can be. We were 2 of about 10 people on the beach. It was AWESOME. We will be making this a regular hang out during warm weather for sure.

On a random note, we went out to another fantastic sushi restaurant and had some salmon that was to die for. We will definitely be regulars at this establishment. :) There's also a French pastry shop right outside the base gates. Joel especially will be tempted constantly due to his love of sweets, LOL.

Also, Joel has a job interview on Monday! Be praying! It sounds like it would be a perfect match for him. Good thing he brought his suit over with us.

Oh, and I like my job a lot. I realize that I haven't talked much about it, but I am having fun with my coworkers and really enjoy the type of counseling work that I will be doing here (especially the 7:30-4:30 work hours - SO awesome!)  In fact, I have already successfully taught a 2 hour class to 45 brand new Marines on substance abuse and have to teach it again next week. I put together a program on the fly and I think it went really well! Hopefully the class will work as a preventative measure for these guys as my job is to basically keep people from being stupid when I can and to minimize the damage for those that already have. :-p

Finally, here is a picture of my favorite thing on base.