It’s the middle of the afternoon and it’s pouring with rain.
This is the view out from where I’m sitting in the garden bar.
I was reminded this morning of the Scottish wife of a doctor I was working with on my elective in England in the early 90s. I was attached to a small GP practice in the town of Peterborough. The couple had a lovely English country house, where I was staying with them. I remember asking her one day where she was from in Scotland. She suddenly got a haunted look in her eyes, and she paused for a moment before saying “Lockerbie”. It may be that the town has sunk back into obscurity now, and it doesn’t trigger any memories for you, but back then the name was infamous for a plane that was bombed and crashed there.
Nagasaki has lived with a similar sort of infamy since that August day in the Second World War when it became the second and so far the last city in the world to have an atomic bomb dropped on it. There’s nothing obvious to see of the devastation now. There’s a peace museum just next to the cruise terminal which we walked past this morning, but according to our travel guide, it’s more about acknowledging Japanese atrocities in the same conflict. A similarly dismal, if equally important, topic.
Instead of investigating either of these subjects this morning, we visited the Glover Gardens, and learnt about the history of European settlers here in Nagasaki. The Victorian houses there are a popular spot for people to have their wedding photos taken.
The gardens are quite pretty and would have been a very pleasant place to linger if it wasn’t raining, although I read somewhere that it rains a lot here. The gardens go up the side of a hill, and there are a series of escalators to make the journey up easier. It’s a great idea and one I’d be all for to help us poor Wellingtonians get around our botanical gardens. Too expensive to be practical I’m guessing and I suppose the exercise is good for us.
We had lunch in a Western style building on the Dutch slopes, signposted as ‘Hollander slopes’, another area of European settlement. I do feel vaguely guilty for not learning more about Japanese culture and history on this trip, but we’re mostly here to have a holiday, right?