Nagasaki continued

This is me having yakitori (grilled chicken) in Nagasaki after we spent the first day of our trip there touring the temples and other sites (see previous post):



(I told my Japanese language class that I had yakitori in Nagasaki and the teacher was shocked that I didn't have Chinese food, which is what everyone else who goes to Nagasaki does.)

The second day we went to Glover Park, which is a nice hillside park with a lot of Meiji-era western style houses that were built mostly by English traders who lived there. There is quite a nice view of the city from there.


At the park we stopped at the oldest western-style restaurant in Japan. American President U.S. Grant ate there on his visit to Japan in the 1870s. We had cake and high tea while sitting at this table, which had a panoramic view of the city (cost: about 7$ each. The Empress Hotel is such a rip off in comparison). A nice tourist from the UK who was sitting across from us took this picture:



We also went to a Confucian Shrine, which was neat. We encountered a bunch of ninjas there so Ena, in a moment of slapstick-hilarity, pretended to be one of the statues of the sages and we were able to get out OK:


Another interesting thing we found was the site of Japan's first Bowling game, marked only by this little stone post wedged between a drinks machine and a street vendor selling jewellery.



We did a lot more stuff, but this blogger only lets me put 5 pictures up per post so I'll end it here.

Nagasaki Day 1

Ena and I spent the weekend in Nagasaki, which was fantastic. Because we did so much I thought I'd make two posts about it.

Nagasaki is probably most well known as the target of the second atomic bomb blast. However, we did not visit any A-bomb related sites. Basically there were two reasons for this. The first was that we've both been to Hiroshima and visited the A-bomb museum there and know that it is an incredibly depressing way to spend a day. Much though we feel for Nagasaki's A-bomb victims we decided we wanted to do some more upbeat things.

The other reason is that the Americans actually missed hitting the downtown core of the city and accidentally dropped the bomb on a suburb about 3 kilometres from today's downtown. Because the museum and the peace park are at ground zero and we were getting around town on foot this would have meant a lot of walking through some drab urban sprawl to get there.

On the first day of our trip we got to see quite a few temples. Thanks to Nagasaki's mountainous location these (along with a lot of people) were lucky enough to escape the bomb blast because the mountains shielded them. Nagasaki's temples are very similar to Chinese temples of the late Ming dynasty, mainly because they were mostly built by Chinese traders resident in the city in the early 17th century. Sofukuji is one of these temples:

This is Ena looking at a big wooden fish they have:



This is a view of the city from a graveyard behind some of the Zen temples:

This is Kofukuji, which is another nice temple:



These little guys are just too cute: