Jan 31
Today we had an easy day visiting Kobe, a city where we arrived and realised there wasn’t really that much to see. It was our second-last day in Osaka today, and we wanted to have a bit of a relaxing day before the travelling we’re going to do over the next week between Nagoya, Tokyo, Sapporo and back to Tokyo again. Though Kobe’s quite a big city, there’s not a lot of touristy things to do, apart from a Bay area (which we’ll do the equivalent of in Osaka tomorrow), a Chinatown (which we’ll do instead with the biggest one in Japan in Yokohama) and an area of older Western-style diplomat’s houses from back when Kobe was the major trading port of Japan (houses which we’ve both pretty much seen back at home and in Europe). We didn’t much like the idea of visiting museums, monuments or temples again… so we spent most of the day shopping.

Lunch was a delicious Western kind of style (well, a Japanese interpretation of it anyway) in a café in the basement of a department store, with potato gratin and a mini bread cob pasta dip thing for me, while Prue had a kind of hamburger steak with soup, cheesey pasta and a custard pudding that we shared. While the atmosphere was really nice, the music played was eclectic and bizarre, all Western and ranging from top 40 rap, hip-hop, to pop, RnB, country, death metal and 80s. I don’t know what kind of atmosphere they were trying to create but it was pretty entertaining anyway wondering what their impression of Western café culture is.

There was a jacket I kind of liked in 0101 that was a bizarre mixture of hoodie and formal suit jacket, but I didn’t really like the price tag so will think about it and hope to see it in another city… Japan’s department stores are really odd, with lots of smaller stores each on the same floor. You can’t really tell where one ends and the next begins, and you have to remember where you picked something up from to figure out which counter to pay for it at. Confusing for Prue when she grabbed something similar from two stores next to each other which both had the same stock. Shoplifting would be a nightmare if their culture wasn’t so honest. On a side-note, the day we borrowed bikes from Himeji, we didn’t have to give them any proof of identity at all. We could’ve given a fake name, address and contact number and stolen two bikes easily. Would never happen in Australia.

After blowing too much money again on UFO/gaming machines (I finally won a mystery Lilo and Stitch bag, to find that nothing inside it was in any way related to Lilo and Stitch) and getting tired of walking around for the fourteenth day running, we got a train home to have an easy afternoon. Prue bought Pokémon Soul Silver for her DS which she’s happily playing, we had Mr Donut for dinner, I’m writing out some postcards and that’s about it. Tomorrow for our last day in Osaka we’re taking on the Bay Area and Osaka Aquarium, a world famous aquarium that’s 8 floors high and has the largest shark enclosure in the world, which has loads of different sharks in it including WHALE SHARKS!!! There’s light snow forecast for tomorrow afternoon as well so it’ll be nice to see the city covered in white. We saved the best in Osaka til last, and I can’t wait!