Nagasaki

Nagasaki

Hello, all! :D As promised, here's my biweekly blogpost - and this one's a biggie! Me and my host family took a trip to Nagasaki!!

But first, we visited Huis Ten Bosch to see the massive tulip gardens and Dutch-inspired landscaping. Huis Ten Bosch is basically a huge amusement park, where we ate lots of castella cake, saw some performers and magicians, and saw some and went to a bunch of different events, too.

After Huis Ten Bosch, we said goodbye to Sasebo and then headed to Nagasaki city to do more sightseeing. The first thing we checked out was Glover Garden. Glover Gardden is dedicated to a Thomas Glover, who was a Scottish merchant and shipbuilder. The architecture there was heavily inspired by the West, and it almost made me feel nostalgic looking around at the different residences-turned-museum.

Nagasaki's really cool in the way that it became home to one of Japan's first ports that accepted imports and exports from other countries. And so it was really neat to see "Japan's first bowling alley" or "Japan's first tennis court" and other influences that would not have occured if Japan hadn't opened it's doors when Commodore Perry made them in the 1800's.

Another interesting side-trip I requested we make was to Nagasaki's Oura Roman Catholic Church, Japan's oldest church and first western-styled building built shortly after the Nagasaki port was opened. It was definitely worth the visit, absolutely beautiful!

Visiting the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum was a very surreal, yet very concrete and almost oppressive experience. I took my time here, reading, learning, and ultimately failing to even fathom such destruction and pain caused by war. The photos and videos were informative but very painful to see (could not stomach the medical videos of radioactivity treatment).

I said many prayers to the victims and for peace, and then me and my host family headed to the beautiful Peace Park to get eased and to visit the infamous Peace Park statue. The statue's pose, I learned, has meaning: the right hand points to the threat of nuclear weapons, the left hand symbolizes eternal peace, the mild faces symbolizes grace and prayer for the victims, and the folded leg and extended left leg symbolize meditation and the initiative to stand up and help other people of the world.

Also, the cherry blossoms were in full bloom there, so I got to take some lovely pics of my first Spring in Japan! Soooo beautiful! I learned that Nagasaki is a generally rainy place, so a lot of my pictures were taken in the rain, too. :>