diamondlife

This has all-in-all been a more laidback trip than America. I've stayed longer in places, just done one thing s day, taken time to absorb some TV and stuff. So this morning I took it easy, and set off about 11. Just as I was putting my shoes on to leave, I heard ZOM on the radio and had a smile; then I realised, Yoko and Hina were actually on the radio show! They were talking about the solo songs, and played a bit of Forward and Wonder Boy, then some guy switched it off. XD So I went out. I went to the Peace Park chatted to a (different, nicer) pair of Americans that I met on the tram when I arrived.

Then I went in the Peace Memorial museum. I freely admit I couldn't make it through everything; there were a lot of bits towards the end that I had to skim, it's just too much. In a way, the museum is the wrong way round - it starts off about pre-war Hiroshima, and talks about how it rebuilt itself after the war, and does it in a really positive way, filled with hope and the triumph of human spirit (within 3 days of the atomic bomb, I'm sure it said they had trams running again, or at least had electricity, which I thought was incredible).

But then, you get into the difficult stuff. There's no other word except "harrowing", but it's something that I think is a very valuable experience for anyone. I still find everything about the circumstances surrounding the atomic bombing just... defies belief.

I may have skipped out on some of the more gruelling parts of the Peace Museum, but I also went in the Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb victims, just around the corner, which has a dim stone room with all the areas of Hiroshima at the time, and a panoramic photo, and a symbolic fountain in the middle - just a quiet place for remembrance, than upstairs there's some very interesting rooms where you can read about survivors' experiences. They have a well-stocked library too, where you can choose from hundreds of accounts, and watch videoed interviews too. People talking about having to leave their dying relatives, unable to save them. The things they saw. Familes whose children somehow made it home from where they'd been working, outside, but there was nothing they could do.

The park outside - and the city in general - is an amazing testament to the people who survived, determined to rebuild afresh. But - to a person like me, at least - you can't help but think about it, walking through the neat, flat, carefully-sculpted park. You think about it.

I walked up to look at one of the approximately two buildings to survive the bombing, then got a cup of tea in a cafe and wrote some more of my jexchange, but somehow it feels a bit tainted now; like it's kind of... disrespectful, when you think about what happened on the very spot I was drinking my tea and eating my scone and trying to write fic on.

Nevetheless. An incredibly valauble day. Going to do the temple walk tomorrow, then on to Nagasaki the day after.