Nagasaki Japan

Today was one of the best days of the trip. One of many I must say. But we walked a lot. we saw a very special site. And we laughed until we almost cried. Lets start at eh beginning.

We started the day with an excursion to the Peace Park. This was the area of the second atomic bomb dropped in Japan eventually ending WWII. This is the Japanese sculpture in the park representing their desire to end war and especially nuclear weapons. Everything about eh sculpture has symbolism. I just don’t remember all of it. But the entire park makes a statement.

14 countries have sent sculptures mostly with statements of peace. It is moving. It also is very quiet. We just walked around with little noise and lots of thoughts.

Our last stop we sat on a bench looking at he Peace fountain. We both sat in silence for severl minutes. I think we were tired …… and more!

We ate lunch back on the ship and decided to walk and do some shopping. Dragons are very much a symbol all over. I liked this one as we walked towards the shopping arcade.

Our neice, Alyssa, said she would like a kimono. So we asked in the terminal information for a good place to find kimonos. It would be in the Arcade at central city. She gave us a map and put dots at her favorite places. The arcade was a little more than a mile from our ship. And it was huge. And totally enclosed. This photo is only one of the areas. Notice the little KFC sign at the bottom right. I could have taken the McDonalds and Starbucks.

So of the stores she told us about one was only new kimonos and the other had new and used. That was our first choice. And we found it first. I won’t go into too many details but kimonos can be very expensive. We found a beautiful used kimono that was mostly green, her choice of color. So we bought it. It cost only US$45. Then we looked at new kimonos. The cheapest was something like US$400. We also saw one nice one at about US$1,500. Do you want to see the picture? It is still in the store. But I took a picture.

Okay what made this day soo great? First of all we walked almost 20,000 steps. It was sunny and cool. We have had so many hot humid and smoggy days that this was really refreshing. But ……

Kathy brought the bag with the entire kimono to dinner at the café. Several wanted to see it. So… Kathy started to put it on. Well she had no clue how. Very soon a Japanese passenger ran over and said to her “you don’t know how. Do you?” No. I will help you. And she did. Many of our friends in the crew came over to see. So did some of the other ladies sitting at nearby tables. I took many photos but will only show this one. That was the lady helping. There was one couple sitting at the table just near us who commented. The man said they took this table to have a nice quiet dinner. It was anything but quiet. And doesn’t she look good in that? Except for the shoes. Our dinner took well over 3 hours. And our sides hurt.

One more comment. I expected that Japan would be very organized. Perhaps they would have better systems than we have in the States. Well. I have been in the power industry for years and there are no places anywhere in the States that have power and communications lines that are like this. So far we have seen this everywhere in Southeast Asia. I don’t know what they do when they have a power failure or a storm that knocks out the power. I could never fix this mess.