Roving Japan

Day 48 Photoset

Before leaving Kobe, there was one last area we had to see. The Sake breweries!

In the span of a few blocks, you can visit about 7 different sake breweries, each one with its own museum and tasting room. Best of all, it’s 100% free!

Our first stop was the Hakutsuru museum. Inside they had set up a bunch of life-sized mannequins depicting each stage of classic sake brewing. It was a little freaky because I honestly thought they were real people when we first walked in.

As we walked through the museum we couldn’t help but notice that the process to brew sake is almost identical to making soy sauce. The only difference is the ingredients. They use the same tools and follow a very similar process.

As we went from brewery to brewery, the sake we tasted was pretty good, but I think we tasted better sake at the Shochikubai factory in Berkeley. Here, each brewery pretty much only let you sample the freshly made unpasteurized sake. It was good, but at the Shochikubai factory they let you taste the bottled stuff.

Probably the most interesting sake we tried was the plum wine/nigori sake. It was good, although a little too sweet for my taste. I liked it a lot better than the straight plum wine though. That stuff is waaay too sweet to drink. Risa likes the sweet stuff, so no complaints from her!

Our favorite treat of the day was the Sake Jello. It’s actually really good!

As we stumbled between sake breweries, we realized that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to do multiple sake tastings while walking outside in 90degree heat with heavy backpacks… but on the other hand, maybe we were sweating all the alcohol out?

When we had visited all the breweries we left for Osaka, the “other” big city in Japan.

We are now in a small hotel in northern Osaka. We are going to stay here for a couple of days while we sightsee around town.

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!

07-05-09 Note: Someone figured out the hack to softbanks carrier file for my phone, so I am now rocking a laptop with a tethered iphone in the tent. I can continue to play catch up with the next several posts, or I can post placeholders and start posting current stuff each day. Right now I am going to keep playing catch up, but if you have an opinion, let me know.

Day 46 Photoset

We purposely booked a hotel in Takamatsu next to the main ferry ports so that this morning would be relaxing. Just head outside and jump on the boat. Too bad for us, we didn’t realize that the ferry to Kobe departs from a port several kilometers to the East! After a bit of panicking, Risa spotted a bus stop that takes people to the port for free! Whew!

The ferry was comfortable, and we had some time to do photo selecting which was nice. The highlight was passing under the “Pearl Bridge”, the largest suspension bridge in the world. I think most of the people on the boat are regulars, so Risa and I were the only ones outside on the bow taking tons of pictures.

Kobe is a cool city. There is a lively china town, lots of foreign inspired food (yay!), shopping districts, and a cool marina area, with lots of restaurants, shops, a marine museum, and Kobe tower.

On our way to the marina, we walked through the Kobe china town. It was a fun, since Japanese people don’t buy cheap trinkets, they buy sweets. This made for a china town focused on food, drinks and sweets. There were still lame t-shirts and little trinkets if you’re looking for that, but not nearly as much as in America. We did walk into one little trinket store and it was as if we had been transported back to clement street in SF. They sold all the same crap, and no one was buying anything. Just like SF!

From china town we walked to the the marina area and explored for a while. There was a ton of food, but we needed a more affordable dinner option (read: cheap). We settled on an “Italian” family restaurant which was basically identical to Joyfull, but with a few more Italian inspired dishes like spaghetti and pizza. The main reason we ate there, however, was the $3.49 “4-glass” decanter of wine. 4 glasses of wine for $3.50? Sold!

They served the red wine chilled, with frosty glasses… but it was $3.50!

Walking home was fun, I took a bunch of pictures of the signs. China town was also pretty cool at night when no one was around.