Two weeks in Japan on the way home, Okayama

We had just left Leuven and were on our way to Japan before we head home! It was a long flight for ten hours except at least we got some sleep!

We got to Tokyo in the afternoon. The next day one of Dad's Japanese work colleagues, Naoki, showed us the Imperial Palace and some cherry blossoms (Sakura), there were three different shades of the flower, dark pink, light pink and white.

That day we left for our main destination, Okayama. We went on a bullet train and they went super fast! When we got there another one of Dad's colleagues, Nobu, took us to our hotel.

The next day we went into the Korakuen Gardens. We could see some of it from our window, which made us more eager to go in. It was so peaceful and beautiful in there. There were so many cherry blossoms and gardens with beautiful designs. There were also many little streams flowing through the garden and a small lake where there were lots of beautiful Koi. We got to feed them and they seemed very hungry, although they just finished being fed by another family!

Then we went to the castle we could see from the gardens and our hotel. Inside it was all modern, like a museum, it had an interactive part where you dressed up, annoyingly, that was closing, that would have been funny!

We went to an awesome sushi train with Nobu, it was really high-tech! You could get food from the train, but you could also order on a computer, then the chefs cooked it and then put it on the train and your computer played a song when your meal neared your table on the train!

The next day we went to Hiroshima, to the atomic bomb museum. First we went to the A - Bomb Dome. That was just below where the nuclear bomb went off. Part of the building was still standing so that is now part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. We had a look at the rest of the memorial and then we went to the museum. I felt it really touching, they showed all the things that they later discovered like children's lunches that had been burned to smithereens.

The next day we went to the old town of Kurashiki. Kurashiki was a old merchants town, where the boats imported rice from the farms around.
All of the buildings were black and white old style warehouses. The canal was so beautiful with the cherry blossoms, weeping willows and swans. We saw traditional wooden boats on the canal, being powered by a man with a long bamboo stick pushing on the bottom of the shallow canal. It was a lot more peaceful than a motor boat.