Christmas Vacation - Hiroshima

What a nice present to have THREE packages waiting for us at the post office when we returned yesterday! We picked them up today, and enjoyed opening all the gifts. THANK YOU!!! It's really special to have such a generous, wonderful family. Jesse is amazing and we can't thank him enough for his thoughtfulness too!! Jeremy and I really enjoyed watching the video and it even brought tears to his eyes at one point (#14, I think?). We are really blessed by all of you!

Here are some pictures from our vacation (part 1 of 4 new posts):

We arrived in Hiroshima on the 23rd (a national holiday: the emperor's birthday), and stayed through yesterday, the 27th. We had a very memorable time and would definitely love to visit the city again sometime. :-)

After shopping a bit with our friends Carla and Jane, we went to a concert at a Catholic church/school. They did Handel's The Messiah, which was excellent (even though the warmth inside the building made many of us sleepy, lol)..


Later that night, walking back to our hotel, we saw these fun light displays along Peace Blvd.






The next day, we spent walking around the city taking in some sights, like the Peace Memorial Museum and park, the A-bomb dome, and some book stores. From the walkway alongside the park you can see our hotel in the background: Hotel Sunroute on the right side) and a fun-named hotel: Hotel High up. :-)


The Peace Memorial Museum was very good; it was shocking and thorough, and left no detail spared. I'm not even sure how to describe it.

Here is a picture of a model of the city of Hiroshima before the bomb and a picture after (the T-shaped bridge was the target, but it was missed by a few blocks):




It's amazing to think of how quickly and beautifully the city was rebuilt.
This is the "A-bomb dome", a building left completely as-is from the disaster.




Santa with his horse and carriage. They were giving rides around the city.


On Christmas Day we went to the Hiroshima Castle (rebuilt in the 50s) and enjoyed looking at their museum of ornate samurai helmets, swords, and other castle/city artifacts left from the original building.


The top floor had an observatory (though there were bars all around it), it still had a nice view of the city, so I took a video of what we saw.


Pictures in Shukkeien Garden, a nicely designed Japanese garden in the middle of the city.










Our first Christmas cake! Here, the popular thing to do on Christmas Day is eat a piece of beautiful (expensive) cake and fried chicken. We got our chicken at a local fast food restaurant and our cake from a convenience store - but shhh!


It was sure tasty though!!


Hope you had a Merry Christmas!