A three week adventure chasing the cherry blossom in Japan. Part Six.
A short train journey outside of Osaka, Kobe is probably best known for its expensively delicious beef. While I am more than happy to flash the cash for a good steak, alas the Bolsover budget did not stretch to one of those pampered bovine bad boys. But there’s more to Kobe besides the beef.
We only had just under a day in the city so tried to make the most of it in a short amount of time. We started to explore the downtown Marina area on foot and what struck me is how European the city felt. OK, I may have read this in the Lonely Planet first, but it really did have a slightly different feel to other cities we’d been to so far.
At the harbour we walked around (rather – climbed over and slid down) some mosaic art pieces and just wandered aimlessly, not really sure what we were doing.
We stumbled across the memorial to the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which is a preserved strip of pavement that is all cracked up and shattered from the quake. A really striking memorial, and very interesting. I also picked up an admirer who insisted on taking my picture in front of the memorial every few metres or so. I now have a collection of photos of myself looking slightly perturbed in various bits of the walkway.
Still lacking any kind of direction we ambled towards the downtown area on the hunt for food. Our Western stomachs were craving sandwiches so we tried to find a shop selling rolls or something. This proved to be tricky and we settled on a teashop-looking-place which was in a covered shopping arcade. The Japanese don’t do sandwiches well and we should have known better. A plate of eggy?fruity?meaty? sandwiches later, we set out again. We ended up in the Chinatown area which was bustling with people, street entertainers and delicious smelling food stalls. We bought meat dumplings, fried balls of something covered in sesame seeds and little pots of creamed sweet potato. The later was truly delicious.
We returned to Chinatown for dinner and picked a big restaurant on the corner of the main square. It was good, but also slightly forgettable Chinese. Could have been in Chinatown in London, New York or Sydney really.
We were all flagging but decided to find a bar listed in one of our guidebooks as a genuine German beer hall. Being a Germanophile (is that even a term?), I was quite excited by the prospect of a stein or two of Bavarian ale. The place was underground, near a department store and quite hard to find. It was also NOT in any way German. The pictures on the wall were those sepia pictures of Dublin streets in the 19th century you see in every Irish bar and the beers on tap were Guinness and Heineken. Disappointing. Guide book FAIL.
The next day we had a quick peep into one of the Sake distilleries near our hostel, but didn’t really have time to take much in, or sample the wares. A quick obligatory visit to the local supermarket then rounded off our Kobe visit before getting our rail passes back out and jumping on the next train.
Next stop – Osaka.
