広島旅程２：平安祭りと広島城

After the marathon of Karaoke, we went to Mac to have our breakfast. And afterwhich, we took a cab down to our youth hostel to dump our bags, before heading out for the 平安祭り.

平安祭り is an annual festival of flowers, greenery and music. It is held annually on May 3, 4, and 5 on the Heiwa Boulevard. The festival attracts over 1,300,000 people each year featuring flower floats built according to designs collected from the public. And this was the main reason why we chose to come to Hiroshima despite the flooding crowd during the golden week.

We went to the Peace Museum (free admission for overseas students studying in Japan) and there we were brought back through the ghastly history of Hiroshima during WWII. And when the atomic bomb exploded 800m above Hiroshima city, all kinds of life forms and combustible items within 2 km were instantly consumed by the storm of fire (at 3000 to 4000 degrees) and sonic blast. And only a few buildings barely survived the Armageddon.

It was a really cool museum, giving us valuable lessons on the disastrous effects of nuclear weapons and such, but given that we hardly slept the night before, we could barely lift our eyelids during the day. The end result: the unglamorous sight of all of us sleeping against the glass wall of the museum.

And after the 平安祭り, we parted into 2 groups: one wanted to visit the Hawaii festival and do some shopping while the other group wanted to visit the Hiroshima Castle. I chose to go with the latter, cos I don't really like shopping.

And the group of exchange students doing SMU jump in front of the Hiroshima castle. 但し、SMU JumpはやぱりSMUの学生に限リです。

The castle bears much resemblance to the 大阪城, though probably less grand and magnificent. Nonetheless, it was free admission for the exchange students, so we were not complaining.

The new V6 inside the castle:

This was my first time travelling with the Canadian gang (from left to right: Adam, Nadia, Rosanna and Justin). Was rather amused by the interests the Canadian gang displayed over small things: like fishes in the pond, tortoises, trees, flowers and many other minute things. So at the end, we took like 2 hours to get from the entrance of the castle to the main castle building. Really fun to be with them and to take our time and smell the roses.

And the highlight of the castle trip was the free rental of the samurai armor, warlord costumes and female Yukata. We were like a bunch of kids, giggling and making a silly fool out of ourselves by taking turns to dress in the costumes.

Nadia the princess and Thor the samurai:

Ben the warlord and Thor the samurai:

Kai the Genghis Khan from Mongols:

Rosanna the Hua Mulan and Adam the mistress. Oh, and we were trying to add boobs onto Adam's chest, but Nadia refused to sacrifice her soft toy for the special touch.

Oh, did I mention that the weather was superb? The weather forecast reported rain for the whole day in Hiroshima and we got kinda worried that the 平安祭り might be cancelled. But in the end, we were really lucky as there were only a few droplets of rain for the whole of Saturday.

運が強いやな！