the Piglet and the Boar

Hiroshima - Sogo, Takashimaya, and Odakyu

We spent an amazing 36 days in Japan! We did a lot of traveling, and we went back and forth between a lot of locations, cities, and districts. To make things easier to read and write, we have grouped everything in our travels into city locations and not exactly by time. The Japan list of contents so far can be found here!

Here is Hiroshima! Our plan in Hiroshima was really to relax and rest our feet, but we spent almost a week there. There was much to see and do.

* Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
* Takashimaya and Odakyu
* Shukkeien Garden
* Mount Misen and Itsukushima Shrine

Another lazy day in Hiroshima is here. Our main goal for the day was to get a massage for our aching feet. After a bit of research in the local area we found Eremi from Eremiya Thai Massage Studio who specializes in Thai foot reflexology. She spoke English and after a couple emails to nail down a time we were able to get booked in. A Thai foot massage was exactly what was needed and if you happen to have some sore feet and are in Hiroshima send Eremi an email to get an appointment.

Rejuvenated, we set off to explore the local area and find some food!

It's always cool seeing weird buildings in the middle of a bunch of normal cookie cutters buildings.

Heart & Heart hotel... where you can book 3 hours... to relax.

Exploring the arcades in Japan is fun. They have games for almost everything you can think of.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, crepes. If only American loved crepes as much as Japan and Canada. You can find crepe stands on almost everywhere in Japan that you can find an arcade or karokee bar.

Black kitty!

And now for the amazing department food store EMPORIUM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! aka SOGO! Yes, yes, I know the icon and the picture are Takashimaya, we actually went to a couple different department stores in Japan, such as Odakyu in Shinjuku, and https://www.takashimaya.com.sg/ but since Sogo was our very first experience into the amazing thing that is department store food... it gets all the credit. Plus the signs weren't worth taking pictures of. Or we forgot.

We first heard of Takashimaya from the travel show - "I'll have what Phil's having", but we kind of forgot about once we got to Japan. Then we stumbled upon Sogo in Hiroshima and had to check it out. It's mostly a normal multi-level department store like Macy's or Bloomingdale's, BUT, with one huge difference.... Food. Rows, and rows, and rows and prepared, cooked, and styled food. Carefully displayed like Jewelry in the jewelry departments with individual sales people at each counter ready to take your order.

If you are in Japan, or visit, you need to find yourself the nearest store so you can see it with your own eyes. It will take your breath away.

One of the weirdest things we discovered about Japan is that salads are expensive. It makes sense due to the climate of Japan but being from California where you can get almost any fruit or vegetable ripe at any grocery store and some quick-e marts its's a bit of a shock having to pay more for a salad than the sushi and fried chicken available a few rows over.

We of course bought a lot of things during our time in the basements browsing all the foods. There were times we were so hungry we didn't always remember to take pictures....

These two salad cost us $22. We were kind of dying for a salad when we bought these which was when we were leaving Hiroshima so we were willing to spend it.