Lost in Translation...but Mostly in Nagasaki
"Let's catch a bus"
"OK"
With that, my friend Jon and I walked a couple of blocks to a major street in Sasebo hoping to hail a cab. We figured that if we could get a cab to stop we would be able to ask, more or less, where the bus station was. How wrong we were. There was absolutely no way we were understanding each other, much less understanding directions. Finally, after pointing to a picture of a bus on a pamphlet I was holding, the cab driver understood and drove us to a reddish building on a busy street. We said thank you and went in.
We had cash money and we were looking for a bus ticket. Easy right? Well, when we walked in we were greeted by a large board (the blog picture) that we couldn't figure out. We went to one of the windows and like idiots, repeated "Nagasaki", in different tones to the confused woman behind the glass.
Hours later, the bus stops and we are let off. I was thinking that maybe since we had boarded at a bus station that we were going to be let off at a bus station. This changed when we were dropped off at a busy intersection somewhere in what we learned was Nagasaki. How would we get back? There was no time to think about that then. We had to explore now, and worry about that later. First thing first, we wanted to get around the area where the A Bomb was dropped but had no idea how. Asking people became an awkward ordeal. Most people avoided us, even as we asked in gentle tones. Those that stopped, didn't know any English. Rightly so I suppose, I mean, I didn't know any Japanese! So what would transpire would be us making a confused lost motion (looking around lost), a Looney Tunes bomb drop whistle, and then our hands would make the shape of a mushroom cloud as we made a rumble.
We were finally able to communicate with someone enough to figure out where to go. We boarded a bus and got off just in time to see the a-bomb memorial park. It had a large statue at the end, that according to the sign was intentionally invoking both the images of Jesus and Buddha to represent peace. On the ground, one could see what is left of the buildings that were there before the blast. On some, you could see the rebarb all heading in one direction, probably from the blast.
After wandering the neighborhood and also checking out ground zero, we were starting to get pretty hungry. It was already late afternoon and we still hadn't eaten. We walked along looking for something authentic and after a while, with our noses leading the way, we found a small restaurant that from the outside looked like a garden shed. It was fairly empty, so we went ahead and sat down. Up until now, in Sasebo and other restaurants we had seen in Nagasaki, there were pictures next to the food either on a sign outside, on the menu, or most times, both.
After twenty minutes of sipping green beverage from an enormous glass, our food came. Jon received an appetizing plate of what looked to be breaded shrimp and fish. Very nice. What I got was a little different though. It was a plate with 2 kebobs. On the skewer were two fried birds. Everything was intact except the beak. The skewer went through the body of the bird.
I left feeling more than buzzed and less than drunk. It was night out and the neon lights were on. There was a plaza that sat above a street and young people sat up there to hang out and play the guitar as traffic drove on underneath them.
Jon took the lead in getting us back to Sasebo. He found a bus station and organized the booking. All I had to do was wait for the bus and sit down. I did that pretty well right before passing out in the bus and waking up what seemed like two minutes later in Sasebo.
