they don't even know what to call it

once upon a time, the rich people of the area lived in fukuoka, and the commoners lived in hakata. urban sprawl turned it into one big city, so now the airport is called fukuoka but the train station is called hakata. so i don't know where i'm at. somewhere at the northern part of kyushu.

anyway, i hit hiroshima this morning and did a whirlwind tour. the atomic bomb stuff isn't really that fascinating, but i can't imagine coming to japan and not seeing it. so i saw the a-bomb dome that they left standing as a memorial, and the peace park. hiroshima is a nice city, and i don't know what the big deal is...everyone looked healthy and alive to me, and nothing was destroyed. just kidding! i know they rebuilt stuff in the last 57 years...they can't fool me. i saw hiroshima castle real quick and walked all the way back to the train station, just in time to wait 40 minutes for the next shinkansen to hakata. oh, coming out of kyoto, and especially in between osaka and kobe, the train goes through tunnels...very very long tunnels. at 186.4mph, a 10 minute long tunnel is really long. it must have taken them forever to dig those tunnels. and after kobe, to the south, i saw the world's longest suspension bridge. it makes the golden gate and even the verrazano-narrows bridges look like toys. it is so huge it seems like an illusion...it doesn't seem real. i was not very close to it, but i took pictures from the train. the full span is supposedly about 12,000 feet, but i am not sure about that detail...i am sure that is from end to end, not tower to tower.

anyway, i came screaming into hakata, got a place to stay, and ran back to the train station in time to jump on the 3:04 train to nagasaki. i wanted to see the other city we destroyed with uranium. i did not have a ticket, so i got a seat on the unreserved car. the regional express trains in kyushu are even newer and more futuristic looking than the shinkansen. i kept expecting hal's voice from 2001:a space odyssey to come at me from somewhere, and i kept trying to close the pod bay doors. anyway, i sat next to this girl who suddenly started talking to me in english. it turns out she had lived in san diego for 7 years. she was getting off at the first stop, but told me it was 2 hours to nagasaki. i thought it was only 30 minutes, so i got off at the second stop and brought the train back to hakata. i will go to nagasaki in the morning.