It only ever seems to happen when I'm high up in a building. But my experience in Tokyo did prepare me somewhat. At about 4am this morning I was awake, just because I couldn't sleep, and then I felt the whole building move under me. It's really quite a difficult feeling to explain, but the eeriest part was not the feeling itself but the noise the building made as it was twisted out of its natural position. This quake was certainly weaker and shroter then the one in Tokyo, but while I didn't have quite such an extreme reaction this time、I still had to sit there for the next 30 minutes trying to get my heart rate back down.
Kobe is a small-ish city of about 1.4 million located just west of Osaka. In fact, the two cities of will probably one day just end up becoming one city, I'd say. It's geography is very similar to Hong Kong's Wan Chai and Central districts; you basically have a huge mountain range surrounded the city, a 5km stretch of the city itself, and then a bay. If the buildings here were all more than 50 stories, it'd be a perfect replica. Kobe is now one of Japan's three major port cities but has a long history of being the original port city. When Japan first opened up it's waters to international traders, they were all required to port and reside in Kobe, and were forbidden from travelling to the rest of Japan.
I have a friend who lives in Kobe (Azusa) that I arranged to catch up with while I was here and I'm really glad that she was able to act as my guide. I saw a great deal of Kobe that I might have otherwise missed out on.
Our day started out relatively late at about 1pm, and we headed down to get some lunch in Sannomiya, the central area of Kobe that is about 20 minutes walk from my hotel. After which we caught up with one of Azusa's friends and headed out to the port and jumped on a spiffy looking boat for a 60 minute cruise around the bay and then back in. It was a beautiful trip and given the weather yesterday (cold, rainy, windy) we somehow managed to be the only 3 people on a boat capable of comfortably holding 100 people. We enjoyed a $2 can of Asahi Super Dry each and enjoyed the view.
After getting back to port Azusa's friend had to head back to Osaka so Azusa and I headed out to a touristy part of town basically called 'foreigner village'. It's the location of several houses built by western merchants who settled in Kobe and this place has become something of a way for Japanese tourists to see what live is like overseas without having to go overseas. I have to say, the buildings were pretty authentic and they smelt like old wooden western buildings. One of them, the english-style house, had a bar built in and we proceeded to drink there for a few hours.
After we both started to get a little bit toasted, we were picked up by more of Azusa's friends and headed out to a buffet restaurant on the 24th floor of the building overlooking the bay. After all the difficulty I've had reading menus in Japan, I was extremely thankful for the opportunity to look at my food before ordering/taking it. However, it didn't help me too much, since some things were unidentifiable for me. I did however try whatever looked alright and came out with a few interesting but altogether delicious choices, including some sort of egg cake.
Following dinner we headed up one of the mountains to a lookout where we could see all of Kobe, as well as Osaka far off in the distance.
There isn't really anything too interesting to report here, but I had a great day nonetheless. I'm about to head back to Tokyo for my last night in Japan before returning home. I always thought that this would be a sad part of this journey, but it isn't that bad. After 5 weeks of drinking, walking, and cycling, I'm looking forward to going home for a bit of a holiday!
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