The party to celebrate the Japanese victory carried on until 4am, ending in an Irish bar, narrowly avoiding the karaoke bar. I was suffering from a nasty chest infection, and only getting two hours sleep before catching the train to Hiroshima certainly didn’t help matters.

I could write an entire blog post on the marvels of the Japanese railway system, but I’ll briefly summarise the best bits here. The trains are ALWAYS on time, they have seats that are like reclining armchairs, they are super clean and the seats rotate so you can always face forwards, you get tonnes of leg room, they paint lines on the platform so you know exactly where to stand for your carriage and people queue in the order that the arrive at the station. The best bit (except from always being on time) is that as a tourist you can buy an unlimited travel pass, so long as you buy it before you enter the country. Anyway, back to the trip….

I really wasn’t looking forward to visiting Hiroshima, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It is a vibrant, exciting city with lots of great bars, restaurants and boutique shops.The first place we stopped was a restaurant in the station where I had been advised you could get the best okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki is described as a sort of Japanese pancake, although I think it is closer to an omlette, and I wasn’t diasppointed.

Hiroshima style okonomiyaki with green onions, cabbage, bean sprouts and pork

The city is striving to be a city of peace and is campaigning for a world without nuclear weapons. We visited the Peace Park, the Peace Memorial and the museum which were fascinating and very sobering. I hadn’t appreciated that horrendously, Hiroshima was targeted precisely because it was so densely populated.

The Peace Park

We then went for a walk to the Orizuru tower which has beautiful views across the city. It is a very peaceful space and as part of the experience you make a paper crane, which you fill with hopes and wishes, before dropping it into a glass display which runs the entire height of the building and forms one of the external walls. There are already hundreds of thousands of origami cranes in the display and there will soon be many more. The staff were very patient at dealing with our total lack of experience (and even managed to rescue George’s after he scrunched it up in frustration)! The best bit of the Orizuru tower is that the get back down from the rooftop café you can take a slide which spirals around the outside of the building all the way to the bottom.

Relaxing on the rooftop

View of Hiroshima including the atomic bomb dome which was directly under where the bomb was dropped and was therefore one of the few buildings to remain standing (although damaged)

Our cranes – the ladies did a great job of rescuing George’s!

Before dropping them into the window, where they will permanently remain on display as a symbol of peace.

The slide down the tower – perhaps not built for rugby players!

A beautiful Japanese graveyard

That evening we found another great restaurant filled with locals and tried yakitori, skewered meat cooked on a grill. I wish we had been able to spend longer in Hiroshima as it really was a beautiful city.

Another great restaurant

Great food, less great drinks. Highballs are foul!