day 12, 13 & 14

I AM SO SORRY. I did not feel like writing in the last couple of days, but I am back today :)

But, I am not going to explain every day in full detail so here are some bullet points about what I have been up to.

DAY 12:

On this day, we traveled from the beautiful island Naoshima to the beautiful city Hiroshima. We had to go on a boat again, so I was a bit grumpy, however I survived and thankfully the train rides after that went by very quickly. When we arrived in Hiroshima, we checked in in our hotel and we did some exploring. We walked to the Hiroshima Castle, however we did not go on a tour inside of it, because we had already seen a castle from the inside in Matsumoto and we wanted to see some other things as well. We walked to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, where found some ruins of old buildings and some statues of important people. I did not really find this interesting, but there was one thing that I found was very touching. My dad told me a story about a girl that died because of the Hiroshima bombing and her goal was to fold a lot ( I´m not sure how many exactly) cranes before she died, however she died before she could fold the amount of cranes she had wanted. So the people around her that were still alive, fold many cranes together and hung them up on the Student Mobilization Memorial Tower, which we were able to see in real life. And as the story said, there were so many cranes hanging on the tower! I thought it was beautiful and like I said, also very touching, 

We ate at the Gusto that evening (we did this again just now haha, for like, the 6th time or something) and than we started to walk back to our hotel (which was around 2 km away.) BUT I was wearing shorts (big mistake) and I noticed that I was stung by a mosquito on my leg. The number of mosquito bites on my legs right now is 14 and at least 8 of them came from that walk in the night... And as I have already told you, I am allergic, so my whole legs were covered in massive bumps, very sexy. 

Anyways we went to bed early and woke up late and this was the beginning of day 13.

Day 13 started a bit grumpy again, but this time it was because we had to travel for 8 hours to go to our next destination, which was Koyasan. I was not looking forward to go there, because it was in the mountains and we had to sleep in an old temple, which I assumed was full of insects and I was so not ready for another spider-experience! We tried to stretch time a little and we stayed in Hiroshima until 10 am. Then we took the train to Osaka, the train to shin-imamiya and the train to Koyasan. However we were not paying attention that much and we missed our station, which we realized a bit late, so we had to take a train back. When we reached the right station, there was no train going directly to Koyasan, so we had to transfer trains 4 times before we ended up at the cable car that took us to Koyasan. We thought our traveling had ended there, however it turned out that we had to take a bus for another half an hour to get to the right temple, and when we arrived there (2 hours too late) the monks weren't very happy with us. Apparently, dinner was served at 5:30 pm so they had to warm up our dinner. We had the quickest guide throught the temple ever and when we were done dinning we could barely find our way back to our room. We took a quick shower and when we were heading to our room again we met the angry monk in the hall, wearing no pants. He apologized when he saw that he was not alone and he hurried back to his room. It was my pleasure to see a half-naked monk (not!) ;)

AAAANNNDD this brings me to day 14, aka today.

When we were woken up in the morning at 6:00, we were expected to attent the morning prayer ceremony. So, me and my dad, both very atheistic, sat on the bench and practically waited for it to be over, while the people around us were meditating with the monks. It was very interesting to see tho, first the monks hit the gong and started singing (I think) and than said some prayers (I think) which also sounded like singing and than I thought it was over but than they started to do it over again. SO, an hour later, we got some breakfast. The only instructions we got were: "go to the dining room where you ate last night." And because we missed dinner we did not know where this room was, so we decided to follow the rest of the people. BUT then this monk yelled "NO NO NO" at us, and we had absolutely no idea what we did wrong this time, but it turned out that all the groups of people were separated in different rooms, but that there was one big group of, like, 20 people that dined together in the big room. We had some quiet breakfast with just the two of us, and I have honestly no idea what it was. It was rice with weird vegetables again and so in the train on our way to Kyoto I ate some bread with strawberry jelly. 

Anyways, before we got on the train to Kyoto, we went outside the temple to look around. The whole village consisted out of temples and a few tourist shops, and of course, some tourists. We decided to leave the place early and when we were waiting at the bus stop we bumped into some Dutch people. Funny enough, they were also from Brabant and we had a little chat with them before getting on the crowded bus. We took the train to Kyoto after that.

We arrived here and went straight to our hotel to ditch our luggage, and I was seriously suprised by the size of this hotel! This hotel is at least 3 times as big as the hotels that we've been to before and it is very crowded. However it is very close to the station and also to the shopping centres, which is were we went to today. Besides shopping and eating at the Gusto again, we did not do much today. 

I will write again tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, I'll see. 

Oyasuminasai!