five favorite moments: kobe
Jun. 13th, 2010 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingblossomIt might be excitement over the JET program or the realization that I never finished talking about my trip last summer, but all of a sudden, I feel the desire to write about the two weeks I spent during August in Japan! I have a journal filled with entries I wrote around that time, but I kept procrastinating when it came to typing everything up, mainly because I was worried I wouldn't be able to cover it all. So, I'm trying something new.
For each city I went to, I'm going to make a list of things I noticed or really enjoyed or somehow, beyond all reason, caught my attention. Certain posts are going to be longer than others, depending on the amount of time I spent in a given city, but I plan on making a few notes about each place. Starting with Kobe. Which is also probably going to be the shortest entry, since I was there for only half-a-day.
Also, warning! I went with my friend Eiko (who I've known since high school), so mentions of her are going to pop up pretty frequently.
1. The vending machine with the words "Drink Tobacco" printed towards the top. I imagine that the intention behind this header was to have "drink" right above the drink selection, and "tobacco" above the cigarettes, but given how close the two words are placed together, it looks a lot more like you're being given the option to drink tobacco instead.
2. The variety of places to eat. Right next to a green-and-white stucco-ceiling Starbucks, there were a couple of restaurants offering North & South Indian dining options, including takeout and a bar. I picked up some Kocha Kaden lemon tea along the way, and enjoyed drinking it while walking through the streets. Now that I remember, we did pass by the Chinatown there.
Eiko and I were looking for this one 60s-style place advertised in this guide we had looked through, called Joe's [Something-Something] Rock & Roll Cafe, but after looking around for two hours, our prospects of finding it seemed a little dim. After even more searching, we found out that it had closed down in the space of less than two years! So we nixed those plans and ended up looking somewhere else to eat.
In the end, we found this great ramen-ya tucked away near a street corner, and I had the chance to try kimchee ramen. Which was delicious. It was also very quiet there -- we were the only customers in the whole shop! The guy behind the counter was incredibly nice; when I mentioned liking the music in the background, he took out a pen, kept on waiting for the radio station to mention the title of the song, and then jotted it down for me on a piece of paper. It ended up being a Bach-gone-pop number.
3. Harry Potter and the *~Mysterious Prince~*. Hmm, I kinda like the ring of that. I guess Japan thought that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (or Harry Potter and the Green-Eyed Monster) just didn't cut it as a title.
4. Kobe's Port Tower, a reddish-orange steel building, lit and glowing. It would've been nice to get a closer look at it, since it has an observation deck of about ninety meters, but it's the sort of thing that stands out even from a distance. It's a shame that most of the pictures I have of it are pretty blurry, because in no way do they capture what the port tower actually looks like. We went there in the evening, so it was particularly bright then.
5. This is going to sound strange, but the Western retailers in the area. I'm thinking of Billabong in particular -- Eiko was looking for something to buy her younger baby cousin, and she couldn't find anything that she thought he might like until we stopped by this place. Once we went in, it looked like we had stepped into a beach catalog. I've never been there before (or seen any outlet for it in the U.S, for that matter, which made me wonder if it was mainly an Australian chain), but...yeah. It was pretty uncanny.
The stained glass here was also quite pretty! Even though I don't remember where we came across it.
For each city I went to, I'm going to make a list of things I noticed or really enjoyed or somehow, beyond all reason, caught my attention. Certain posts are going to be longer than others, depending on the amount of time I spent in a given city, but I plan on making a few notes about each place. Starting with Kobe. Which is also probably going to be the shortest entry, since I was there for only half-a-day.
Also, warning! I went with my friend Eiko (who I've known since high school), so mentions of her are going to pop up pretty frequently.
1. The vending machine with the words "Drink Tobacco" printed towards the top. I imagine that the intention behind this header was to have "drink" right above the drink selection, and "tobacco" above the cigarettes, but given how close the two words are placed together, it looks a lot more like you're being given the option to drink tobacco instead.
2. The variety of places to eat. Right next to a green-and-white stucco-ceiling Starbucks, there were a couple of restaurants offering North & South Indian dining options, including takeout and a bar. I picked up some Kocha Kaden lemon tea along the way, and enjoyed drinking it while walking through the streets. Now that I remember, we did pass by the Chinatown there.
Eiko and I were looking for this one 60s-style place advertised in this guide we had looked through, called Joe's [Something-Something] Rock & Roll Cafe, but after looking around for two hours, our prospects of finding it seemed a little dim. After even more searching, we found out that it had closed down in the space of less than two years! So we nixed those plans and ended up looking somewhere else to eat.
In the end, we found this great ramen-ya tucked away near a street corner, and I had the chance to try kimchee ramen. Which was delicious. It was also very quiet there -- we were the only customers in the whole shop! The guy behind the counter was incredibly nice; when I mentioned liking the music in the background, he took out a pen, kept on waiting for the radio station to mention the title of the song, and then jotted it down for me on a piece of paper. It ended up being a Bach-gone-pop number.
3. Harry Potter and the *~Mysterious Prince~*. Hmm, I kinda like the ring of that. I guess Japan thought that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (or Harry Potter and the Green-Eyed Monster) just didn't cut it as a title.
4. Kobe's Port Tower, a reddish-orange steel building, lit and glowing. It would've been nice to get a closer look at it, since it has an observation deck of about ninety meters, but it's the sort of thing that stands out even from a distance. It's a shame that most of the pictures I have of it are pretty blurry, because in no way do they capture what the port tower actually looks like. We went there in the evening, so it was particularly bright then.
5. This is going to sound strange, but the Western retailers in the area. I'm thinking of Billabong in particular -- Eiko was looking for something to buy her younger baby cousin, and she couldn't find anything that she thought he might like until we stopped by this place. Once we went in, it looked like we had stepped into a beach catalog. I've never been there before (or seen any outlet for it in the U.S, for that matter, which made me wonder if it was mainly an Australian chain), but...yeah. It was pretty uncanny.
The stained glass here was also quite pretty! Even though I don't remember where we came across it.
