長崎 - Nagasaki

It's been 2 days since we got back from Nagasaki, and I'm still awestruck by the things we saw there. I'm going to try not to rush through it all, but I can definitely say the Atomic Bomb Museum and Peace Park aren't going to be adequately represented here...it's just something you have to see firsthand. I've 150+ photos, yet not to be overwhelming have pared it down to...60. Anyway...let's see here...

We left early Saturday morning, meeting out in front of AP 1 at the delightful time of 7:45am. As you can tell by the photo at right, it was a morning we're coming to recognize here; that is to say...foggy/drizzling. Everybody piles in, checking off on an attendance roster as we board, to make sure we're not forgetting anyone. When the crowd's all loaded and seated...we're short one person, whom the 2 AP buddies/Summer Gateway staffers go to find. Turns out I'm not the only person who has a bad relationship with alarms...apparently Connor got up earlier than he'd wanted, reset his alarm, and went back to bed...not realizing the alarm wasn't set right. He gets on board, we're at our full complement, and we leave APU.

Since the weather is...less than pleasant, with heavy fog obscuring the major roadways, we take to the prefectural surface streets. This wasn't at all a bad thing, as the countryside was really damned beautiful, and offered many chances for photos over the 3-hour trip.

The problem I continually ran into, however, is the moment I start to take a picture (my camera takes about a second to process it), a tree comes along...sooooo many times.

The entire 2-day trip to Nagasaki was part of the Summer Gateway program, so with part of our program fees, they hired the bus, and arranged a tour guide to show us about Nagasaki, have a few of the highlights, and, as we found, provide commentary on the bus itself. Turns out she normally leads bus tours for...older foreign tourists, so she was quite pleased to have a bit of a change-up guiding a group of students about.

About midway of our trip we stop at a highway rest stop, and are afforded about 15 minutes to stretch, relieve ourselves, and if we so desire, get some munchies from the local stands. In addition to about a half-dozen established shops in the rest stop building, including a Starbucks...there were stands from locals set up with things such as fresh-baked melon bread (seriously...he had a baker's oven in the back of his van), to yakitori, and something involving red beans. I wandered about as the drizzled had let up a bit, and found this map of Nagasaki Prefecture that had highlights of good things to see in the prefecture as a whole.

Being as mountainous as Japan is, the highways frequently weave through tunnels en route to your destination. Our first view of Nagasaki, being situated in a valley, is exiting a particularly long tunnel from the highway. It's certainly a cool and somewhat dramatic presentation I wished I'd had a good vantage point of. Alas .__.

Also as part of our trip is 3 meals; the first of which was a hotel-provided Chinese-styled lunch. We debark from our bus, walk into the Hotel JAL City, and we're welcomed by the sign here: アジア太平洋大学様御席 [Asia Pacific University Students' Seats] guiding us upstairs.

While it's your standard multipurpose room arranged for dining (with unfortunately low-clearance tables thanks to supports being unkind to my knees...), it's still a very nice place. They bring out our meal: fried rice, and an interesting seafood stew thingie over crisp noodles that softened up nicely when mixed well with the stew over top. I'm not entirely sure what the pink pieces were (and it was a pretty vibrant pink), but it was good. The lunch was wound up with a dessert tofu (I'm pretty sure) that tasted reminiscent of berries. Delightful.

After lunch we have about an hour to meander nearby the hotel before the tour proper begins, so pretty well all of us walk over to Chinatown, which is basically a pair of cross streets within the square block the Hotel JAL City abuts. Each of the 4 entrances (NSEW) is crowned by a gate like the one shown at right. There's a number of neat little shops and restaurants tucked away inside, so we do some browsing and meandering, returning to the bus to begin our tour.

 Before the bus departs, we see across from the hotel a rather...interesting car park, that we later saw repeated throughout the city. The driver takes their car into the space, hops out, and their car then rotates up and out of the way, leaving a new empty carrier ready for the next customer. It was quite the novelty...everyone kept wanting to see another car load in and go up so they could get a photo.
The bus takes off, and on our way we of course run into some hilarious engrish signs...I was able to get the first one for this yakitori place, but there were better ones just out of camera range.

The first stop on our bus-and-walking tour of Nagasaki was the man-made Dejima island. Back before the isolationist period imposed by Toyotomi Ideyoshi (if I'm remembering the eras properly...), this was the only port for trading and contact with the outside world, which at the time was through the Dutch. Originally this island was out in the bay, but nature kinda took back over that land, so it was relocated/recreated here. The trading post was a man-made fan-shaped walled island with 2 gates: one with a narrow bridge connecting the mainland, and another sea gate that was only opened when a Dutch trading flotilla arrived to unload trade goods (sundries, news of the world at large) in exchange for gold and silver.

The Dutch weren't permitted to leave the island, nor were any of their families allowed to be there with them. This was a measure to ensure minimal contact with the main population, as well as rather clearly state that the arrangement was for trade only, not immigration. Nonetheless, the rooms and buildings in Dejima, while having walls, floors, and windows of Japanese make, were decorated in a very European fashion, as the main banquet room showed. Other rooms, such as a less official dining hall and the sitting room shown below were also recreated.

Dejima itself is recreated as a museum, with numerous exhibits telling of the island's history: establishment, construction, operation, and so on. One of the buildings first meets you with a charter list of all the Dutch officials and personnel staffing Dejima, as well as a timeline of the Dutch trading up until the isolationist period. Also in some of the more traditionally Japanese-styled rooms were offices (shown above) for such things as translating trade manifests and the news brought in by the Dutch. Because this was such a painstakingly slow process, Dutch ships would often be anchored out in the bay for 2-3 months at a time while longboats unloaded goods (the ships themselves weren't allowed to dock directly at Dejima), manifests translated and checked to match the goods they reported upon. Further wandering about showed an antique cannon, the old flagpole (which looks more like a ship's mast...may have been repurposed), a movie detailing the history of Dejima, with headphones providing translation, and the garden tucked away in the northeast corner that sported the scale miniature of Dejima island at the time of its operation.

Our free wandering time up, we head back to the bus to move on. One of the guys apparently lost track of time and was still meandering about the island, so our tour guide and one of the APU Guides went to go find him. As he boarded the bus, he was met with a chorus of obligatory s#*t-talking for us waiting, and we moved on.

The next stop on the tour was one of, if not the most, powerful ones: the Atomic Bomb Museum. This statue at left is outside the museum; we didn't get to get a close look at it or figure out much about it as we were moving at a pretty decent pace to walk around the building to the entrance. You're not permitted to take any photos beyond the entry foyer of the museum itself, so the description, though inadequate compared to the real thing, shall have to suffice.

Approaching the museum's main entry, you notice one thing behind the glass walls of the foyer: thousands upon thousands of paper cranes. The cranes are a symbol for the wish of peace, relating to a young girl who suffered from leukemia (she was 2 when the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, near her home), who folded 1000 paper cranes to grant her wish to be cured. The crane is one of the holy creatures in Japanese mythology (alongside such as the tortoise and dragon) that will purportedly grant a wish to anyone who folds 1000 origami cranes. These 千羽鶴 (senbazuru: thousand-paper-cranes) are a common gift in Asian countries, often gifted at weddings wishing for a thousand years of happiness, etc. But I digress...these cranes have been donated by hundreds of different organizations ranging from schools, churches, and individuals supporting the cause of peace and an end to nuclear weaponry worldwide. There were many, many more, some going into such ranges of colors to even be murals designed wholly from origami cranes.

From the foyer we traveled down the central spiral ramp to the basement, where the exhibit begins. I have to say, this is the best museum exhibit I have ever seen...it's a very well-laid out and powerful presentation.

Upon entrance to the exhibit, you're in a reverse C-shaped hallway, greeted by a partition wall with a photo of Nagasaki as it appeared before August 9th, 1945. As you turn right and walk around the partition, you see a row of video screens showing the footage of the mushroom cloud from the air. On the backside of the partition is a solitary smashed clock, its hands eternally frozen at 11:02am, when the Bockscar dropped the plutonium-based "Fat Man." You then turn around, and enter the room showcasing some of the wreckage recovered and preserved following the blast, with banks of TV screens below with documentary footage and firsthand accounts of that morning. The far wall of the vaulted room is dominated by part of the wall of Urakami Cathedral, one of a few structures that was far enough away from the hypocenter of the blast that it wasn't completely destroyed.

The next room contained a small model of the valley that houses Nagasaki, with a row of TVs encircling it that played a video showing the timeline of the blast and its immediate effects, with projections highlighting the affected areas shown on the video. The wall behind it outlines the timeline of the bomb's development and the reasons for the target selection (Hiroshima was home to shipbuilding, Nagasaki had a munitions factory), leading up to August 6th and 9th. Following the wall around this large room, you're next met with a full-size recreation of the "Fat Man" bomb, complete with a cutout showing the size of the main charge, explaining how it achieved the detonation. Continuing about the walls were cases elaborating on the various effects of an atomic blast, with wreckage, photos, and even clothing providing visual explanation. Tattered clothing from flying glass, parts of houses burned from the flash with intact 'shadows' permanently left on them, melted ceramic tiles, telephone wire, trees, and so on. One particularly striking exhibit was showing various recovered materials, some rendered unrecognizable by the power and heat of the blast, with one part of it simply saying "This exhibit can be touched."

The next room had 2 walls with many firsthand accounts of the aftermath of the blast, the stigma associated with being an 'atomic bomb survivor' scarred from burns, poems written, and so on. The last room of the exhibit provided a timeline of the Japanese and Chinese side of WWII (all in Japanese, but I'll refrain from further comment), banks of screens showing the full timeline of the atomic bomb's development, other sufferers from atomic bomb test side effects, all flowing along opposite a very long wall detailing the post-WWII world of the Cold War and the arms race, with a continuing count of the atomic bombs present int he world at each stage. It's rather unsettling how many still exist, despite being beyond the age of Mutually Assured Destruction.

One thing we all notice through our individual progressions through the exhibit is that nobody says a single word. We're all rendered speechless by the power of the exhibit, witnessing the horrors of war. It was...a sobering experience. I'll state right now that I haven't been able to get up to DC since the Holocaust Museum opened, but this is a museum whose impact will be very hard to compare to.

Leaving the museum, we walk down the front steps, cross a bridge, and enter the open park for Ground Zero. There's a larger panorama shot of this available on wikipedia under "Hibakusha" (lit. explosion-affected people). At the far end of the park from the museum is this memorial, a large stone plinth marking the spot where, 500m straight up, "Fat Man" was detonated. There are concentric stone circles (or arcs, more precisely) emanating outwards from the plinth, and a few statues scattered throughout: one to the women and children, the largest affected group of the bomb's aftermath. Also in this park is the other part of the wall from Urakami Cathedral, relocated and still standing. Tucked away in an alcove behind the cathedral wall portion were thousands more cranes.

Leaving Ground Zero, we walk a bit further and up the hill to the Peace Park. There are several statues along the walk up, all donated from around the world in the name of hoping for peace, and "No More Nagasakis," the first of which was donated by Nagasaki's first sister city, St. Paul, Minnesota. Walking up a staircase we're met by the peace fountain at one end of the park, with a clear view down to the Peace Statue. The large granite block is at the fountainhead, water flowing beneath it to the fountain below. As we were standing there with our tour guide explaining it and the poem carved into it, 2 different people came up, kneeled down, and splashed water on the stone from where it was flowing beneath it. Our guide explained that the carving was from an account of one girl who, following the bombing, was unable to find clean water to drink, greasy fallout covering any source she could find; despite the uncleanliness of the water, she drank anyway, being so thirsty. As such, those who come to this park are able to splash clean water from the fountain upon the stone for this girl.

Walking south towards the Peace Statue, we pass by this bell. Urakami Cathedral was home to 2 bells, one of which was damaged in the blast, and was part of the exhibit. The other was rung for the first time since the blast on Christmas day of 1945. The bell shown here is a replica of that bell, and is still rung for various memorials and occasions. A number of other statues occupy the grounds of the park, which was built on the former main prison of Nagasaki; the foundations of which have been left intact as part of the park.

 

 Reaching the south end of the park, you're met by the 10-meter high bronze Peace Statue. Our guide explained the various points of symbolism prominent as part of the sculpture: the finger pointing skyward is to warn of the threat of nuclear weapons, the outstretched hand is for peace. The face is very calm and serene, indicative of a divine nature (Buddha-like), with the one folded leg to show meditation. The strong physique and the bent leg represent the strength to protect, and the readiness to rise and defend against aggressors.

Leaving Peace Park, we drive south through Nagasaki towards Glover Gardens, passing another iconic remnant of August 9th, 1945: the one-legged Tori. Tori are the iconic sort of temple gates you see throughout Japan; this one's mate was felled during the blast, and remains lying where it fell. We were moving at the time and didn't get to go closer to see, hence the glare from my camera's flash...the picture right before it had a light pole obscuring the 'floating' end of the tori.

Reaching Glover Gardens, we're met with a sight that reminds me very much of Castle Erice in Sicily, with this large hill of shops leading up to the garden and houses of the Glover Estate. Thomas Glover was a Scottish-born businessman who came to Nagasaki at 21 and was a rather key figure in its development into a modern city with shipbuilding, coal mining, and so on. (fun fact: the moustache on the Kirin on Kirin beer cans is in honor of Glover himself...he helped to establish the brewery) His estate is preserved as a gorgeous garden, far more European than Japanese. Higher up the hill is one of the oldest cathedrals in Nagasaki, I'd have more about it were it not for our rather...hurried pace.

 

 The entrance to the park is yet further uphill, and a series of staircases, escalators, and pedestrian-movers later puts us at the top of the hill, home to the 2-story former Mitsubishi dock house. Out in front of the dock house is a large koi pond, with koi that were easily the size of catfish. With bags of feed available for 200￥, I'm not surprised they got as fat as they are. This hill overlooks Nagasaki harbor and a vast panorama of Nagasaki itself, so I took the opportunity to take several photos and stitch them together:

Pretty cool view. The rest of the gardens we were then allowed to peruse at our leisure, with a number of things to catch our eye for photos. I got a few of one of the fountains, and as I was trying to get another, Zeff decides he's going to try and jump in front of my shot. Remember how I said my camera takes a second to process?

Jackass.

Further down the hill are more fountains and gardens, the Glover house proper and the guest house, a Japanese garden, and more koi ponds, and a cool view of the bridge crossing the inlet. There's more photos, but those'll have to be in other albums.

Leaving the gardens, we load back into the bus and travel the short distance to our hotel. I gotta say, they put us up in a really nice place for the night. As the name suggests, it had somewhat of a French air about it (without the pretentiousness), and a lot of neat amenities. Our rooms, which had real beds compared to the platforms we sleep on in the dorms, came with closets complete with slippers, provided pajamas (Ebeneezer Scrooge-style nightshirts...I wish I'd had a cap to accompany it), and a bathroom that had the infamous Japanese high-tech toilets, but replete with amenities such as toothbrushes, 2-dose sized toothpaste, combs, and large-sized pump-bottles of body wash, shampoo, and conditioner...no teeny bottles here. The windows had proper shutters on them instead of curtains, able to completely block out the early sunlight that's all too common here. The rooms open by an rfid keycard, which is then used in a card reader to allow the lights to be turned on (much like the dorms and the dorm keys), and each one even has a doorbell. Also available for guests is a vending machine in the hallway; the first one I've run into yet in Japan that, yes....

sold beer. These aren't common out on the streets, at least not in Beppu nor Nagasaki, though cigarette vending machines are about as frequent as the soda ones. One cool thing about the tobacco vending machines is that they require you to enter your citizen ID card (driver's license-ish?) to verify your age before it'll vend anything. Pretty neat.

Dinner that evening was about a half-mile walk away through Chinatown and the Hamanomachi Shopping Arcade to a traditional Japanese restaurant the name of which escapes me. There, we enter, remove our shoes, and head upstairs to a shoji-screened, tatami-floored room with the traditional low tables, where a teshoku (set-meal) of Nagasaki specialties was laid out for us. I'm not sure what the pink stuff on the rice was apart from perhaps a grated version of the pink fish thing from the Chinese lunch, but it wasn't half bad. The broth of the soup (which was primarily a huge saturated chunk of tofu with misc. meats and pickles floating in it) was good, though I can't say I was a fan of the consistency...I largely ended up just having the broth and what was floating in it. There's also pickled ginger, a thick, bacon-like cut of beef that tasted like pot roast (delightful), and something else which I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, even less sure of what it was.

After dinner we're set free to wander for the night, so we wander back to the hotel to regroup and split up our separate ways, depending on what each group wants to do. I, and about a half-dozen others opt to do something more interesting than to go find a sports bar, get drunk, and watch the World Cup, so we grab some of the tourist maps the hotel provides, and pick some random places to wander and go find.

Our first stop walking down the street was the nearby Lawson's, a コンビニ (convenience store) chain much akin to a 7-11 (which are also here...weird), where we grab some munchies, or canned libations, and happen to notice some flyers, which fold out to posters, for the new Studio Ghibli film, which looks to be a Miyazaki take on The Borrowers. There's gonna be a BBQ in mid-July when that comes out, followed by a knot of us going to Oita City to see said movie (wheeeeee). Our eventual target is seen at left: 眼鏡橋 (Meganebashi: Spectacles Bridge), so named because of the dual arch, when reflected in the water below, creates an image like a pair of spectacles. Having made a wrong turn or 2 on the way here, we ended up walking down side streets for awhile until we got to a point where there simply weren't any people, or even streetlights at that point (we find out tomorrow that that road is home to a lot of various temples), so we turn around and end up asking some locals where we were, and how to get where we were going.
Finding the bridge, we walk down along the riverside a bit, cross, and take some photos.Walking downriver from there, heading in the general direction of our hotel, we happen across a tiny little playground, where of course we can't resist screwing around and taking pictures. Apparently many states in the US have banned these little rocker-things due to too many kids falling off them and their parents making a stink. *sigh* I remember the days when playing and getting hurt were damned near synonymous. Nice to see those values still exist somewhere.

Further wandering past Hamanomachi (the shopping arcade) and one of the cool bookstores therein led us to a common night sight: tiny food vendors. These places are as about as authentic of local food as you're ever gonna find; commonly they're a tiny little cart with some benches you can pull up, or better yet, simply the back of a van opened up and food served from there. The first one we found was an おでん (Oden) stand. Oden is basically a kinda stew: lots of different things, from hard-boiled eggs or daikon radish to yakitori and fish cakes are cooked in a dashi broth on skewers, then plucked out by clients and eaten. Wandering back closer to our hotel yielded the takoyaki (again, octopus meatballs) stand, which was the aforementioned 'out of the back of a van' deal. Behind the curtain is one of the owners working the grill for the takoyaki, a few canisters of propane are outside the van for the grill, and you basically stand and take your food with you. It's pretty awesome.

Yep, plenty of inappropriate and juvenile jokes were had at this sign's expense.

Sometime after midnight we return to the hotel, having wandered a fair bit of places about the south end of town near our hotel, and discovering more about how to get places, such as the train station where we're set to meet the next day, but were never explicitly told the relation in space between our hotel and it...
I go shower, then soak in the marvelously hot water that flows so freely here, then hop into my comfy bed and have the World Cup game starting its replay on the TV. About 2am the first of my roommates wanders in, followed perhaps 20 minutes later by our third, along with a trio of the group who went out to find a bar. 2 of them are considerably the worse for wear from their evening; one only barely managed to not be carried back to his room adjacent to ours. Knowing that we have to be up in about 5½ hours for the gratis breakfast, we kick other people out and go to bed.

Sunday, we wake up and it's pretty well pouring rain. Weather.com had stated that there was an almost definite probability of rain the whole weekend, so having had at least Sat. rain-free, we kinda figured we were due. The breakfast was quite tasty, I finally got to have coffee that was decently strong (vending machine coffee is about like a Starbuck's Frappacino, but sometimes even sweeter...), then meet up with a few people to find some sights and shrines.

Given that it's pouring rain, we decide to postpone the shrine- and temple-seeking in lieu of something indoors where it'll be dry, ask the hotel front desk people where these museums are, purchase our one-day all-you-can-ride passes for the streetcars, and head out. Nagasaki has a very convenient streetcar system that runs the length of the city, and goes to points east around the temple/shrine-heavy district. Going by the information from the hotel, our first stop was to be the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum. Being close enough, we opt to simply walk there from the hotel, going through the seaside park there. However...it's 9:30 when we get there, and they don't open until 10. Crap.
Whelp, we take an easy walk to a nearby train station, and figure with the wait for the train and travel time, we'll be up to the next museum by opening time. Only problem we then encountered was that, well...we couldn't find the museum, because the hotel people weren't wholly sure where in the vicinity they circled it was. As we're walking, we ask a few locals where to go, and find a lady at a parking garage? who provided us with another map, and where this museum was. So, we hop back on a train and head south towards the new directed area, kind of annoyingly give up on trying to find these places, and instead go to find some of the bigger shrines and temples in the area.

First stop was Suwa Shrine. The question I'm sure that is being asked is "what's the difference between a shrine and a temple?" The answer is quite simple: shrines are generally shinto, while the temples are Buddhist. Pretty easy. At left is the view going up the stairs to Suwa; note the complete tori to give you an idea of the scale of the one-legged one seen on Saturday. While there's a lot of stairs ahead, what's not shown is that this was taken from about halfway up the climb...

In a shinto shrine, one of the things patrons do upon arrival is stop over at one of these little fountain-like dealies to cleanse themselves. You take a ladle, rinse your left hand, then your right, then take a little in your mouth to rinse it. Then you're good to enter the shrine itself. Off to one side is a counter with various charms and fortunes all available for sale by the miko girls. Shinto is a very practical religion; it concerns itself primarily with everyday things, rituals for purifying oneself in preparation for a new job, new child, new marriage, new home, and so on. There are various charms you can purchase for protection of oneself or loved ones, good luck charms for travel, job hunting, or school examinations, and so on.

Another rather key point in Shinto, and also one of the basis for the everyday practicality of the religion, is that there are natural spirits, or kami in most everything in nature: a powerful waterfall, a mighty tree, a large boulder, and so on. As such, certain objects thought to have a resident kami are usually seen with ropes and braided paper surrounding them to denote this divinity, and also to protect the kami from contact with impurities surrounding it. This particular boulder was higher up on the hill, through a long pathway of tori leading up to this little sanctuary building in the right of the frame. Out in front of the building were several fox statues to the kami Inari, a god of messengers. One notable feature of the sanctuary was the offering box and the large rope tied to a bell. For this, you toss a coin (or two) into the box, clap your hands and shake the rope, ringing the bell, to get the attention of the nearby kami. Now that you are noticed, you pray for something in particular, such as the safe journey of a loved one, or good fortune on an exam. Again, very practical religion.

Leaving Suwa shrine we headed out and about to find our way over to Kofukuji Temple. As we're walking the streets to get our bearings (every map we get is oriented differently, and not all streets are shown on them...), we find a sign pointing to the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture...where the lady from the parking garage directed us...which wasn't the Nagasaki Natural History and Folklore museum we were looking for...but at this point we've said 'screw it' to those, so we continue down to find Kofukuji. Dating back to ~1620, Kofukuji was the first Obaku Zen temple in Japan, and has been designated as a "Nationally Important Property."

It's a pretty impressive-sized spot of land, largely given over to the graveyard that extends pretty well up the hill behind and to the left of the frame above.

Another thing you can purchase at temples and shrines are fortunes. We're talking with one of the temple attendants (lady spoke very good English), and Jessica bought one. The best part is that, like a fortune cookie, you've no idea what your fortune will be, good or bad, so it was pretty amusing when she unrolled the tiny scroll to behold her "Barely Good Fortune." On the one side, at least it wasn't a bad one.

We're about running out of time before we have to meet up to travel back, and we're getting hungry, so we simply opt to head to the nearest train stop and head to Nagasaki station. We arrive there with about 15 minutes to spare, seeing the rest of the SG group slowly coalesce, and drop into the station's food court. One tandoori chicken sammich from Lotteria later, we load back up on the bus back to APU. The same tunnel leads us through the mountain, out of the valley, and away from Nagasaki. Definitely an experience I'll remember.

The weather's better, albeit still not great, on the way home, so we're able to take the highway and get some decent views. I'm still plagued by the same problem of tree and shrub interference, but manage to get some good shots. Nearly everyone was falling asleep on the ride back, having been out so late the night before, and up so early for breakfast, which of course led to other people screwing with them, and pictures aplenty to be taken.

3½ hours later and we're back in Oita Prefecture, having stopped at the same highway rest stop on the way back (I got some killer fresh maple melon bread from a guy with a bakery oven in his van), closing in on APU. This was the same approach I took on the Fukuoka highway bus when I first got here, but the approach is cooler during the day when you can actually see.

(Ok, ok, it's cloudy, you can't really see it all that well, but you get the point)

Nagasaki was a hell of an awesome trip...certainly something that's gonna stay with me for the rest of my life.