Today we took a trip to the town of Hiroshima. We took a subway train from the Namba station to the Shin-Osaka station. There we went to the JR ticket office and got reserved seats on one of the Shinkansen trains bound for Hiroshima. Having the JR passes is great. You get reserved seats on the Shinkansen trains and do not have to pay extra. It took us about an hour and a half to reach Hiroshima. Again using our JR passes, we were able to get on the city Loop sightseeing bus without having to buy a ticket. We took this bus over to where the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. We saw the remnants of a building called the dome that is all that is still standing. Where the bomb was actually dropped has been made into a park called the Peace Memorial Park. They have monuments in the park to honor the people that died that day.
After walking around there we got back on the sightseeing bus and took it back to the train station. We got on a local train and took it to a station about 30 minutes away, so we could take the ferry to Miyajima. Again using the JR passes, we did not have to pay for tickets. The ferry only takes about 15 minutes. We walked around the island and saw the Torii gate that stands in the water. We then took the ferry back to the mainland and got on the train back to Hiroshima. In Hiroshima we got tickets for the Bullet train back to Shin=Osaka, the a subway ride back to Namba.
