A Product Of	Me with a "shinkansen" bullet train at Hiroshima station. These things FLEW! The last 10% of the trip, distance-wise, and the last half of the trip, time-wise, was on this "Red Express" rickety rail through the mountains. My hotel room in Nagasaki. 7'x4' with a roll-up futon and a tatami mat. 4000 Yen per night! A deal. If you're ever there, stay at Hotel Tampopo! The stairs leading up to the "Peace Park". These little girls where whispering and pointing at me while I rested by the Peace Park fountain, and when I asked one of them to take my picture, I thought she was going to die of joy until the others crowded into the frame. Then, she was wishing one of them was taking the picture. More kids in the Peace Park (sculpture garden) who wanted to be in a picture with the only American in town. A pretty canal on my walk through town. It had just stopped storming, a torrential downpour that started without warning, and stopped just as fast. A scale model of how Nagasaki looked when it was a dutch trading port. A statue on my walk through town. I believe it was called "Spirits Ascending". This is the roof of the Atom Bomb Museum. The statue in the center is a memorial to the children who died in the blast. This memorial is in a plaza across the way from the Museum. I couldn't take pictures inside the museum. This is Epicenter Park. The black monolith shows the spot above which the bomb exploded. The original ground level of the park was something like six feet higher. The brick structure in the background is all that remains of what had been the oldest Catholic church in Asia. Another view of Epicenter Park. A gateway to Epicenter park. There had been a cat sleeping on one of the posts, but another passerby scared him just before I took the picture, and now he's just visible as a white blotch behind the right-hand post. A streetcar. Nagasaki reminded me of San Francisco in a lot of ways. Streetcars, European influence on architechture, built on a bay, replete with hills and curvy streets... The re-built Cathedral that had been destroyed in the war. A view of Nagasaki Harbor, including local industry. A much nicer view of the harbor, taken along the way to the Dutch Gardens. Nagasaki rooftops, as seen from the escalator in the Gardens. Large and small coifish in the garden. The Dutch Governor's mansion, and a clutch of local schoolgirls. The two looking at me asked me to take a picture of them with their cameras right after this. And then they returned the favor by getting me in front of this waterfall. One of them said something along the lines of, "Thank you for the honor of the picture." I guess that "domo arigato gosaimasuta" means a lot more than "thank you." Apparently the guy who wrote "Madame Butterfly" lived and wrote in Nagasaki. That's him behind me, and her next to me. A cemetery nestled in among houses. I saw about a dozen cemetaries throughout Japan, and they all looked like this, a stark contrast to park-like American cemeteries. Another nice cathedral, right across from the cemetery. Some students who took me out to dinner and Karaoke. Pictured: me, Eiko, Koji, Ai and Michiko. Ai and Michiko found me when I was looking for a post office, and after a creole conversation in English, Japanese and German (we did the best in German), they invited me to join them and their friends. Ai and me. I think we were doing backup vocals on "It's Automatic," a hit in Japan at the time. Hiromi (who joined us after dinner) and Michiko. I don't know what they were singing, but Michiko sure was rockin' out! Koji and me. I'm not sure if we were singing Bohemian Rhapsody of some Beatles song. Eiko and Ai giving the photo-peace sign. Ai, me, Michiko, Hiromi and Eiko. I don't know what the song is on the karaoke screen. The gang. The next morning, I left town. I had not known that out of service trains were called "deadheads", so I found this amusing and took the pic. I found out on the way back to Tokyo that there are like three levels of "bullet train." If you don't get on the right one, it'll go fast, but it stops at EVERY stop. Getting back took an entire day, when it should have taken like eight hours. D'oh!