we’ve fallen off

So sorry for the delay everyone. We have been in the final push/ scramble of our trip, so our energy has been a bit low. We are combining Thursday and Friday’s post because on both days we had a lot of travel time, so not a ton to report.

We started off our day bright and early and headed to the Shinkansen to start the journey to Hiroshima. We followed an itinerary that Conner found on Reddit on what we should when doing once we got there. It was actually perfect for what we had time for. Also, Reddit has carried the food recommendations on this trip so we are big fans and highly recommend if you ever go to Japan. We started at the Hiroshima Museum and walked through the exhibits and it was so devastating and the imagery that was featured was very graphic and heartbreaking. We paid to get audio devices that explained the photos and texts that were in Japanese only and it was 100% worth it. I didn’t take a ton of photos because I wanted to be respectful, and honestly, it was too graphic to put here. After that, we walked around the park around the museum stopping at various sites that had been left in ruins or memorials that were constructed in honor of the victims. On our walk, we were stopped again by Japanese students so they could practice their English. These students were much younger maybe 10 and were very interested to find out we are from New York (Conner declined to divulge that he’s from Minnesota lol).

After we finished up at Hiroshima, we walked to our hotel.

We spent the rest of our night having a few drinks at the hotel which was by far the nicest place we have stayed at yet, and of course only one night :( .

The next morning we headed out very early because we were headed to Studio Ghibli on our way to Tokyo. The park was in a random place, that was very quiet and secluded. We were so excited to go to this park, but thought it wouldn’t be that crazy based on past reviews we have heard, but we absolutely loved it. It definitely is catered toward kids, but the recreation of the Ghibli world at the park was so amazing and they hit the mark on every detail.

We had tickets to go into the Ghibli Grand Warehouse, Mononoke Village, The Valley of Witches, and The Dodoko Forest. The Ghibli Grand Warehouse was a big warehouse that had a bunch of different exhibits highlighting all of the most popular Studio Ghibli Movies and we got to watch an exclusive Ghibli short which was so cute, we love their animation style so much. The Valley of Witches was a combination of Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howls Moving Castle, and another movie that Conner and I haven’t seen, so it’s safe to say we were obsessed. We ran out of time to complete the last two exhibits because we had to take an hour subway ride back to the train station, to catch our train to Tokyo.

Once we got to Tokyo, we got a delicious bowl of Ramen to end the night! Talk tomorrow<3