Hiroshima Zoo

Posted on 2014/11/16 07:41:33 (November 2014).

[Saturday 8th November 2014]
We took Erika to Hiroshima Zoo in the daytime. It's a bit of a trek to get to, being on the outskirts of the city, and as we couldn't all fit in Chie's parents car we went by bus, which seemed to take forever.

To be honest I'd expected it to be a bit half hearted, but considering how incredibly reasonable priced it was (about 500 yen for adults - that's roughly £3) it was actually quite impressive. They had all the main attractions - elephants, giraffes, lions, tigers and so on, plus a particularly impressive baboon enclosure. If you're into baboons. So hopefully Erika really enjoyed that.

On the way back I couldn't quite face the endless bus ride again, so instead we decided to break up the journey a bit, and went back some of the way by "Asstram" - a not particularly well connected elevated tramline which seemingly goes from one bit of Hiroshima's suburbs to another bit. We then had to get another train to connect from that to the main station in Hiroshima, then finally another train from there back to the station nearest to Chie's parents place.

In the evening we thought we should take advantage of the fact we were staying with Chie's parents, and get them to babysit Erika so that we could have that now once in a blue moon event of a night out together. We weren't really that sure where we wanted to actually go though - since Chie has lived away from Hiroshima all of her adult life she's not actually that familiar with the nightlife there, plus I of course don't know any better.

After some searching on the web I'd found a place which offered vegetarian Hiroshima style okonomiyaki - something I never thought I'd be able to have in a restaurant here. So given that seemed a much more locally relevant experience than just going to an Italian restaurant, which we could just as well do back home, that's what we settled on.

The okonomiyaki was very nice, but it's not really something you tend to linger over, and after an hour we were basically done, and scratching our heads for what to do next. Somehow we decided we wanted to go to a "tachinomiya" - a bar where you stand up to drink - and after wandering around for a while found one, had one drink, and then had ran out of ideas again. So we just headed home after that. Still, at least the okonomiyaki was nice!

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