My abroad living and overseas traveling!

So when you get news that your being sent to Japan, of course your going to be happy. Brush up on your japanese and look up all the sights you see, but there is one little problem. The area your going to in Japan, you have no clue where it is and have never even heard of it. That lovely place is called Iwakuni, and you’ve probably never heard of it either if your never been. When I first set foot in Iwakuni I was obviously amazed first off because its surrounded by mountains, and if you’ve been too Texas well there’s not a lot of mountains so its amazing to me. I wasn’t overly amazed though because since I was in the military I landed on a base so one of the most American parts of Japan, but if we fast forward a few weeks there I was out with the boys exploring the place. Not even a week had went by before I realized there was absolutely nothing in Iwakuni besides a very amazing bridge(pictures above) and the street downtown that we all referred to as yellow brick and this street was were all the drinking done. I was full these bars were basically a girl comes to sit next to you unless you tel them to leave you alone and they’ll talk to you up until you either buy them a drink or get annoyed and leave. Its a gross street honestly but I’ve had a lot of fun there , though I didn’t make it habit to go there.

Now back to the bridge, it consist of five arches and for the most part its wooden and pretty amazing , during the day you have to pay a fee to cross it but if you don’t want to do that you just take the long way around. The bridge runs over a river that you can go play in if its hot and unless its winter its hot. Once over the bridge there’s a lot more stuff to see, there’s a bunch of food and for some god awful reason a 100 flavors of ice cream. Now sounds great until you see some of the flavors that they have, like soy sauce, green tea and many others that I can’t recall now. Thats all in one area if you walk a bit more you’ll get too this man made waterfall thing (that’s the best way to explain it). You’ll eventually get to the base of the mountain where the castle sits on top of , now there’s two ways to get up the mountain. If your insane or a workout weirdo you can hike/ crawl up the thing (I’ve never done it so I can’t say how long it takes or how difficult it truly is) or you can take the ropeway to the top and even when you get up there there is some walking to do. Its so nice when you get up there especially during the cherry blossom season and since there are lots of trees its cooler. When you finally reach the castle it will be amazing but now that I’ve traveled around Japan a lot more I’ve really its not that grand( Its still amazing though) the view you get from up there and all the ancient relics that are inside the castle are definitely breath taking.

So that’s Iwakuni there’s not a whole lot there and even people that live an hour away by train don’t even know it really besides that the base is there. Would I recommend it if you have limited time in Japan ,not really but if you get the chance to go there multiple times or your there for an extended period then of course check it out! Luckily for me Iwakuni is in the middle of Japan so all the other locations are accessible, and I’ll talk more about these locations next time.