Roving Japan

Day 47 Photoset

This morning we wandered into the Ijinkan district of Kobe. This area is known for the western style mansions that were built here when the first foreign traders moved into Kobe. We walked around and took pictures, but we didn’t go in any of the houses since they were charging $5 / house and there are about 10 houses to see. Also, each house represents a country, and a few of the houses didn’t seem to match their supposed country of origin. In particular the French house looked Spanish, and the Italian house looked English. I’ve never been to Europe so I’m not an authority on their architecture, but Risa has, and she didn’t think those houses looked right.

From there we walked towards the cable car that takes you to the top of Rokko mountain. On the way, we past by a little hole-in-the-wall takoyaki/sobameshi place. The lady who worked there was really nice, and we enjoyed watching her whip up our food. The sobameshi is a local specialty. It’s essentially fried rice with chopped up soba noodles included in the mix.

The cable car up the mountain was pretty cool. It was a lot like the cable cars in SF, only it was built at a 30deg angle. A quick 10minutes later, and we were at the top station where a bus awaited to take us to the view point.

The view from the top is supposed to be one of the top city view points in Japan, but we didn’t have good luck with the weather and we couldn’t see much of the cities below. It was unfortunate, but hey, what can you do?

Back in town, we did some laundry and then went out to dinner. For dinner we would have preferred Kobe beef, but since that is about $150 - $200 for a 250g steak, we decided we would try to hunt down a good hamburger. Yesterday we past by an English pub that had a delicious looking plastic hamburger on display, so tonight we were going to eat it!

As you can see in the photos, the patty is a little bit smaller in real life. The taste was there, but man, WHERE’S THE BEEF?! Also, 5 french fries? Five!? I was both happy to have a decent tasting burger, and sad that it was so small (and expensive! $9!!!). After dinner we had to buy some donburi to fill us up.

The Bait


The Switch

We’re on to Osaka tomorrow!

Day 26 Photoset

We did so much stuff yesterday that we figured we should take one more day to actually recharge before we head out again. So today we did something new, we went to the movies!

The big movie in Japan right now is called “Rookies!”. The previews made it look like “Major League”, but set in high school. Crazy looking characters and their crazy baseball antics. We figured it might be funny, and since it was a sports movie, I could probably follow along even though it was in Japanese.

30 minutes after the movie started, we were in the lobby demanding our money back or a ticket to another movie. Rookies is possibly the worst movie Risa and I have ever seen. Terrible acting, terrible camera work, terrible writing, not funny… just horrendous. Nothing good to say about it. Risa says its the worst Japanese movie she’s ever seen.

The girl at the counter tried to explain that since we saw half the movie, we could only see half of another movie. This made no sense, so we complained some more and she called a manager. He quickly resolved the problem by letting us get another full ticket to any other movie we wanted. There weren’t a lot of choices, but we settled on Angels & Demons with Tom Hanks. Compared to Rookies, this movie was Shakespeare. On it’s own, it was quite entertaining. It doesn’t hold up to a lot of scrutiny, but its totally entertaining while you’re watching it.

The other main highlight of the day was the Hamburger we had for lunch. I’ve been craving some American food, so I was happy to get a burger. It won’t dethrone any American born burger, but it was pretty good.

Tomorrow we are going to head north. There is an island called Kashima about 10miles up the coast and 3 minutes from the shore by boat. It has a free campground and an onsen!