Back From The Great Beyond

My mother and father made the trek to Japan for the yearly festivities of Golden Week. It was their first time to the land of the rising sun, and they got a jam-packed extravaganza of temple-viewing, island-hopping, and chopstick-using.

Here are a few pictures of the highlights:

Dorothy and Bill Carmin, fresh of the plane and waiting in line to board a bus bound for Kyoto.

A friendly reminder from the Tour Club in Kyoto where we stayed for two nights.

Kinkakuji (or The Golden Temple) in Kyoto on our first day of sight-seeing.

Mom and Dad hanging high above Kyoto in the top of Kyoto Tower.

The garden of Nijo Castle in Kyoto.

Sunset over Kyoto, the Gion district.

Taken while walking through a Gion temple at night.

The A-bomb Dome in Hiroshima. This building was almost directly under the explosion on August 6th 1945 and because of the character of the bomb, the building's frame was left relatively in tact. At the time of the bombing, the building was functioning as Hiroshima City's Industrial and Cultural Center. It was preserved as a reminder of the bombing of the city at the end of WWII and is a part of the city's peace park and Atomic Bomb museum.

Near the HUGE tori in Miyajima. These ladies were out sight-seeing for the day and struck up a conversation. They had just started college in neighboring Hiroshima.

A very tall pagoda in Miyajima.

I'll post again soon with some more photos of the trip. Either the server at school is going crazy, or it's Blogger, but I can't seem to add more photos at the moment. These shots were from the first three days of our trip.