I would not say this is the highlight of this holiday, it is however one that I’ll remember the most as it leaves an impression on anybody that would visit this place. Visit the Children Peace Monument, and try to read the story of Sasaki Sadako without getting a tear in your eye. Not many pictures, I wasn’t in the mood and Sunny’s iPhone suffered memory corruption and lost a lot of photos in the process for this day and tomorrow. If you’re worried about radiation, don’t. The only thing left here at the Atomic Dome is the usual 0.03millisievert background radiation from space as we have that in Western Europe as well, except we get a 0.22millisievert bonus from the ’86 Chernobyl disaster.

The keep, the park and then the shinkansen to Hiroshima……

If you are wondering about the picture with the buttons, I was looking for just the “Flush” button. Figured that one out later, but toilets come with options in Japan, even seat heating. The only thing that comes with seat heating at home is my car, definitely not my toilet…

The second day of our holiday in Japan begins with the cell broadcast you are waiting for as a tourist. Still glad we changed the start of our tour which was Kumamoto as there is a nice black keep there, instead in order to save on travel time the smaller black keep of Iwakuni took its place. Things might have gotten interesting if this didn’t happen. Now the first picture was send back to Holland with the accompanying text: “In case you don’t hear from me, you know what happened.”. At that moment not even fully aware of the extent of damage this earthquake had caused. I’ve added some footage found on youtube on what happened to the castle in question.

Visit to Kotohira-ga (temple), which is one climb to the top. The Japanese are a friendly people, but I did stop counting how many times we said ‘Konnichiwa’.