Hiroshima

 

The next day, on the 13th, we headed to Hiroshima. We used our Seishun Juuhachi Kippu again so it took almost seven hours. It wasn't too bad though and it didn't really seem quite that long.

 

I was surprised by how rural some of the area between Osaka and Hiroshima was. I made it a contest of who could spot a konbini first. It took like an hour, haha!

We finally arrived in Hiroshima a little after six. I wanted to eat dinner at Sweets Paradise (a cake buffet!) so we headed there. The walk there was interesting because Hiroshima was a bigger city than I expected and was pretty lively. I liked the river running through it.

There are many different Sweets Paradise restaurants in Japan, but I wanted to go to this one because it looked super cute. At this one we got 70 minutes to eat all the cake we wanted. Well, we arrived not too long before closing so we only had about an hour, but that was plenty of time.

They have regular food, but I went straight for the cake. Then I decided to at least get a little pasta. But I mostly ate cake for dinner. :)

I had a couple types of chocolate cake, lemon, lemon blueberry, raspberry, and mixed berry cakes. They were all pretty good (one of the chocolate ones was really good). Not amazing, but still tasty. I had read online that their cakes weren't that great so I knew what to expect, but they were a bit better than I thought they would be.

The place looks very girly so I was surprised by a group of high school boys there. They seemed to be taking advantage of all-you-can-eat though, haha.

Towards the end I noticed that they had club soda and a few different flavored syrups. I made a passion fruit peach soda. Yum! :)

After leaving Sweets Paradise we headed to the Peace Park. On the way there we walked through a covered area called Hondori.

We passed by this little place on a corner where you could buy drinks including fresh squeezed orange juice. It looked cute!

At the park we saw the Genbaku Dome, which is a building that remained standing after the bombing.  It has been preserved how it was back then including rubble around the outside of the building.

We also saw the Children's Peace Monument. I didn't get a good picture of the statue, but the part on top is Sadako holding up a paper crane. She was a girl who got leukemia because of the radiation and thought that if she folded 1,000 paper cranes she would be cured. Now children in Japan and around the world fold cranes to be placed at this monument.

After  visiting the Peace Park we walked around Hondori some more. Most of the stores were closed already, but we went to Tully's for a little bit and Jonathan got a mango drink. 

We then went to an arcade and spent quite a bit of time. there.

I got a cell phone strap from a Gachapon (capsule machine). Haha, it looks sad but it's so cute! :)

I could't resist doing purikura and forced Jonathan to take these pictures with me. Purikura is always so crazy!

We had come to Hiroshima mainly just to go to Miyajima, but I ended up really liking the city too and had a lot of fun! I wished I had planned more time there.