During the past week, Akemi and I traveled to Kyushyu, Japan's island to the southwest of Honshu. We had a really nice, relaxing time. Our stops included Ibusuki, Kagoshima, Sasebo, and Nagasaki. All had their merits, but I really enjoyed Ibusuki for its "sunaboro", or hot sand bath, and Nagasaki. The sunaboro is amazing because it's on the beach, and the sand is naturally heated by all of the underground geothermal activity. Cool, but scary! The place is a ticking timebomb of volcanic eruptions! In fact, Kagoshima has an active volcano directly across the bay from it -- not unlike the geographic proximity of Naples and Mt. Vesuvius -- named Sakurashima, or "cherry blossom island". Sounds so innocent! The last eruption was about 10 years ago, which apparently was pretty small. If they ever have a Mt. St. Helens-sized blast, that city is history.
All of the local foods were incredible, including the unagi (eel), champon (Chinese-style ramen), Castella (pound cake originally introduced by the Portugese), and kujira (whale). Ooops! Yes, I tried whale. Now, I can't see making it a regular meal, and I feel guilty for eating it, but it was quite delicious! In fact, much tastier than I thought it would be. We had it raw, sashimi-style, and it actually tasted more like tuna than beef. Strange -- maybe whales' diet of seafood gives its meat a similar flavor. And, as you can imagine, it was fairly expensive. So, something definitely you need to try once, but something I wouldn't recommend picking up for your average backyard BBQ.
Nagasaki was great in that it's a very beautiful city with a lot of character considering its tragic past, and there's alot of sightseeing. We only had time to see the Peace Park and Museum commemorating the bombing, and Deijima. Deijima was a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki Bay built by the ruling shogunate in the mid-1600s which was the only port in Japan open to contact and trade with foreigners. This period of Japanese isolation lasted about 200 years, until the doors were opened to Western culture during the Meiji Restoration of the late 1800s. Deijima was initially occupied by the Portugese, then by the Dutch. The island is extremely small - only a few thousand square meters in size. But nonetheless, I think the European occupants led a relatively plush life there.
Below are just a few pics from our trip. I'll have to try to post more later when I learn more of the intricacies of using this computer. As it is, just to upload these took a really long time - probably something I'm doing wrong! Sorry -- no photos from Deijima since it was raining bucketloads the entire last day in Nagasaki. Later my brothers and sisters!!
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