Last week we took the Shinkansen from Kyoto to Hiroshima and again hit the ground running... we took a short local train ride to Hiroshima Port where we could catch the ferry across to Miyajima Island... a quick 10 minute ferry ride across the inland portion of the Sea of Japan! Some fun facts about Miyajima Island include that is it one of Japan's 3 most scenic views, the entire island is sacred, and no one is allwed to give birth or die on this island. Most people travel to Miyajima Island to visit the famous floating torii gate that is located on a sandbar in front of a shrine. The floating torii gate symbolizes that the ENTIRE island is sacred and it is truly beautiful! At low tide you can walk all the way out to the torii gate, but it wasn't low tide when we visited this site! 
Miyajima Island is also home of the very awesome invention of a rice scoop!!! The largest rice scoop in the world (as pictured behind us in this picture) is on Miyajima Island and took over 3 years to make and weighs over 2 tons!!! You can buy rice scoops in every store along the main walk! Another funny thing in Miyajima was that there were wild (but very tame) deer walking around all over town and in the parks... they looked a little mangy and rough around the edges but they certainly weren't skittish at all! VERY different from the deer I grew up seeing in New England who would take off running at the sight of you 50 yards away!!! After walking around the island and seeing all there was to see (a lot was closed because it is very seasonal over there and freezing this time of year) we took the ferry back across to the mainland and then the train back into Hiroshima to have dinner. We found a great little place right at the train station that looked delicious and they didn't speak any English... which makes it even more of an adventure!
We had LOTS of beer (biru) and we all had a very oishii dinner! We were seated next to a group of Japanese business men that were on their 3rd extra-large bottle of sake by the time we finished eating and were getting pretty rowdy.... extremely entertaining! We finished our big beers and ordered some sake to end the evening, and all of a sudden there were only 2 of these Japanese businessmen left next to us and they were trying to talk to us... obviously between all of us we couldn't say much!!!
One thing they could say was "sake champion" and they began calling me this... we had a fun time with them and one of them actually ordered us some really yummy hot sake which we definitely didn't need at this point! We all drank sake and had a blast! We made some new friends too...Japanese Word of the Day:
Shakushi (shaw-koo-she): Rice Scoop
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