I eventually felt peckish and looked around for a restaurant and spotted the Caffe Ponte by this bridge.  It's name suggested Italy but I like Italian food and what is pasta but noodles by another name.  The place was full so I put my name on the waiting list and after a while was admitted.  The meal was definitely cross cultural.  It had a magnificent contribution from Italy that they called focaccia but it wasn't like any bread of that name that I've had before.  It was an air-filled ellipsoid of the most delicate and delicious rosemary flecked bread sitting on a small rectangular snow white plate that accommodated a circular depression filled with pesto sauce.   It was gorgeous as was the soup and the seafood pasta, which was not in the soup thus declaring itself more Italian than Japanese.  Though where does chicken noodle soup fit in, or some versions of minestrone?  I'm sure there was a tasty pudding as well but I've forgotten.

One of the waitresses was clearly not Japanese and I heard her speak accented English and thought she most probably was Italian although her accent didn't really fit that hypothesis.  It turned out she was Polish married to a Japanese.  You have to wonder where they met.

The rain continued to be a nuisance but the next day dawned bright and warm so I set off with tens of thousands of other people to Miya Jima which is an island famous for its shrine and its deer and its general delightfulness.  You take a train that heads off through the western suburbs of Hiroshima to Miyajimaguchi.  Here we are making our way out of the station.

You then saunter down to the ferry terminal where your crowd merges with the people already there and you embark on the ten minute crossing, first noting the whereabouts of the lifejackets as instructed by the tannoy.

This is what you see as you approach and it's that red torii that you fight to get a decent picture of on land. 

Here's my best one, remarkably free of tourists and other nuisances.

It's a gateway to the shrine but not terribly practical if you are not in a canoe.  Instead you can pass through this one.

There are deer wandering about all over the place very popular with the kids as you might imagine but they are not fussy about what they eat so you warned to keep a tight hold on your chips or even your oysters which are currently in season on Misha jima and selling like hotcakes.  On the few occasions I've had oysters I haven't been too impressed so I settled for a nice noodle dish in a quiet restaurant away from the main drag behind the pagoda and had a chat with an American who had just taken up employment in Japan.

After a few hours I set off back to Hiroshima and arrived just in time to catch an outburst of rain in which to make my sodden way to my hotel.  It cleared up later and I took a walk by the river.  There are actually half a dozen rivers running through the city into Hiroshima bay and form to my mind one of the delights of the place.