Japan – Part 5

Aloha! It’s Thursday morning here in Hiroshima where we arrived last night after finishing up our performances in Osaka. I want to send a big mahalo to everyone who’s been coming to see us – we are so blessed to have such great fans here in Japan!

Shortly after arriving at the Hiroshima shinkansen station last night, we headed straight over to the Hiroshima Hawaiian Club party at one of the local hotels. As usual, everyone was having a blast and we joined right in by performing a couple of songs and hula before heading on over to our hotel. After checking in, we walked over to our favorite okonomiyaki restaurant, Henkutsu-ya, and ordered our favorite “soba special”.

The weather here in Hiroshima is beautiful with temperatures in the high 60s. The Flower Festival is now going on and it’s one of the 3 largest festivals in Japan with something like 5 million people attending over a span of 4 days. We finished our sound check over at the Phoenix Hall located at the Peace Park, and headed back to the hotel to meet up with our relatives from Akiota-cho,Tadao and Erika. They brought us a huge bag of Alex’s favorite Hiroshima rice … man, that sucker was heavy!

By the time we finished our performance, the streets and sidewalks were packed! We could hardly walk without hitting people with our instruments. After we dropped our equipment off at our hotel, we headed on over to our favorite Indian restaurant in Hiroshima – Nanak! I ordered the medium hot chicken curry with their awesome naan bread. We were all perspiring by the time we finished our curries, but boy, was it good … especially when washed down with a couple of mugs of ice cold nama (draft) beeruz! Mark and I then walked over to the food booths and grabbed some kinako mochi on a stick … mmmm, good!

It’s now late afternoon and we’re about to leave the hotel to catch our train to Fukuoka … our final stop before heading back home to Hawai’i. This was a very quick trip!

Mahalo, Hiroshima … wish we could stay longer! Maybe next time …

Aloha, “D”