Monday, August 15, 2005

hiroshima

what a sight to see. you get off the tram and you walk into the peace parc, and the first thing you see is the a-dome, the last building left standing after the atomic bomb was dropped a few meters away from that building. where i was standing was just a few meters from the target of the bomb. simply insane.

looking at the building, reading stories, looking at monuments, you really gets chills that go right through your entire body. the events were horrible. the effects were catastrophic. it's hard to wrap your head around it and comprehend what really took place. you see the building. you see the river. you see the bridge. you see pictures of how the city was before. how it was after. nothing was left standing, practically. and then you see today, a beautiful big city, a beautiful green parc and fishes living ion the water...

you complain about the heat, and then you learn that when the bomb was dropped, the explosion caused the temperature to rise to 40'000 degrees, 1 thousand times worst than the current weather. how can you possibly comprehend that kind of heat? you see melted roof tiles, but that kind of heat, that's numbers that you can't register.

in the museum there are really detailed descriptions of what happened, and why. although there are many theories about that, and no one really knows for sure... but what's for sure is that they keep showing you images of before and after. they really try to convince you that a and h bombs are evil and should be eliminated, which of course is true. but at points it really feels like they repeat themselves and like they're trying too hard... wax sculptures of people with burned clothing and melting skin. pictures of the burns on people's skin. a finger of a kid that fell off, and his mother kept to show his dad... how he was so thirsty that he sucked the puss coming from his fingers. that kind of thing.

the kind of thing that you don't really want to see, read, hear. i guess that you need to see those things to really understand what happened. but it's just too much. especially with the crowd around you.... and what a crowd it is. you can't even move there's so many people.

overall though seeing this place was good. it's a moment in history that should never happen again and being there really makes you re-evaluate a lot of things.

like just how lucky we are.

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