Nagasaki was one of those places I just felt that I should visit just out of principle.  I’d studied the atomic bombs in history class and knew what they meant to WWII, but seeing the twisted staircases, carbonized trees, and melted glass in the museum really put it back into perspective.  I didn’t take many pictures of the atomic bomb museum and I didn’t really want to.

 

The atomic bomb is the reason Nagasaki is known worldwide, however there is actually a lot more to do here.  The city itself is actually very busy, bustling with activity, tourists, shopping malls, sushi and starbucks.  A network of cable cars run every few minutes to take you wherever you want to go.  We got the day pass.  Well worth the Yen! It was a 2 hour train ride from Sasebo, so we arrived ready to get lunch! Someone had read that Chinatown has excellent food, so we hopped on a cablecar and headed on out.  The internet never lies and we found an awesome little restaurant. I played it safe and got fried rice, which is one of my favorites anyway, so it all worked out great.  Chinatown itself is really interesting. It seemed weird to me to have a chinatown in japan, but they’re really 2 different cultures.  They also had these tasty little meat filled pastries for sale on every corner, little Koi ponds, and all kinds of cute clothing with pandas on it.

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t get any pictures of lunch because Jessica always takes the food photos, but this is my blog so they don’t get uploaded. My bad. But really, it was fried rice. Pretty universal stuff… After wandering around the few blocks that is chinatown we got bored and hopped on another car to the main part of town to get coffee mugs from Starbucks (Jessica collects them) and ended up walking through a giant indoor shopping plaza. Many jokes about women and shoes and shopping and sales were made, but I feel I should point out that Jessica and I were making a lot better time than the slowpoke herd of boys we were with.

I really wanted to see a shrine or temple of some kind in Japan and hadn’t found one yet, so we set out in search of a shrine.  The allknowing internet indicated one just up the street so we went for it.  Ended up walking through the “cool” part of town where all the bars and tattoo parlors etc were. Pretty neat peoplewatching.

 

 

Finally found our temple. I think it was a temple.  Pretty neat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 After the temple, we explored the city a bit before heading back to the train station.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s way way more in Nagasaki than the bomb museum. If you’re ever in the area it’s well worth the trip.  We could have used another full day just to see the stuff that’s on the tourist map.