Friday - Kobe: Aching backs and feet

This is the "Before" picture taken on the steps up to our apartment. Don't we look happy and energetic??? Read on. Chrissy
This morning, Saturday, I slept in for the first time in ages. We got back from Kobe last night a little after nine. Chrissy worked on the Blog and I fell asleep watching the Hanshin Tiger game. I barely caught one inning before I was out. It is very difficult for me to sit on our two pieces of living room furniture, both are about 2/3 the size of what I am used to. My knees poke up in the air. So, I find myself more and more on the floor, sitting on straw covered pillows. They are disks about an inch and a half thick. They aren’t too bad to sit on. Even our dining room table is too short; my knees hit the bottom of the table, as well as my desk at work. The pillows on our bed are small and hard. One has some buckwheat husks in it. I actually like that one, but with the bed the way I described a couple of days ago it all adds up to an achy back.

Thursday, George Jetson day, all I did was nothing. I walked across the street and paid my gas bill at the post office. Claudia wanted someone to go with her because every time she tries to run errands like paying the gas bill, they yell at her. She speaks a little Japanese. She wanted to bring me with her, so they would get the confused American look and not yell. It must-a worked. No one yelled. I handed my bill to the postal worker and shelled out my 835 yen and was done. Claudia did the same. The entire trip from my door and back took us three minutes. Then I napped and watched high-school baseball on TV. They are having a tournament down at Hanshin stadium. We might make it down there sometime.

Friday, Chrissy and I made it to Kobe. On the limited Express from the Hankyu station it is only three stops away, maybe ten minutes ride by train. The Hankyu station is just a little further away than the JR station. Hankyu is a privately run line and JR is state run, I believe. The Hankyu is also a little cheaper. The ticket Kiosks at Hankyu, where you can purchase your fare, were entirely in Japanese. Enter confused American. It never fails. It turned out we just needed to drop in our 260 yen and press the 260 yen button and we got our tickets. The young couple who helped us this time even pointed us down the right staircase, but we already knew.

Kobe, is much more compact than Osaka. The guidebook pans Kobe. It is mostly a new, very western and upscale. Kobe has no coastal plain. The city slopes gently down to the coast. It has many high-rise buildings and a fairly well defined downtown. Kobe is pretty good at placing maps around the city on street corners, but they don’t name all of their streets. In Japan, what I have seen, they name their “cho’s” or neighborhoods. You will have 5 or 10 blocks of buildings in a single cho. On our ride back from Santo, we asked the Japanese teachers what the name of the street was on, none of them knew. So the maps are only so helpful. We actually picked up three maps from a hotel, but each one was slightly different than the other. Each had different points of interest, and each had a slightly different center of the map.

Okay, now my defense is in place.

I wanted to take Chrissy to a Japanese garden up on the hill. That kinda’ stuff means more to her. So we walked up the hill. Our first point of interest was the Hotel Lasse, where we picked up a couple of maps. Next we stopped at an Antique store and looked at some of their cool but highly priced items. I think one thing we saw was an urn complete with ashes. The next thing we saw was a steep hill with a rock wall. There was a neighborhood at the top of the rock wall, way up the hill. It looked pretty cool from where we were. Then there was a park, with a lot of cool plants, but not a garden. Then we turned down the hill where the garden should have been, and we stopped into a Buddhist Temple. Blue dragons were perched on the top of the roof. Under the entry gate was a mural of the story of Buddha.
The pillars supporting the first gate were carved pillars. The carving was of a dragon wrapped around the entire post, on the dragon were people riding horses, engaging in battles and traveling through life and facing demons. That was worth the price of admission itself. Inside the temple there was even a more Buddha’s covered in gold.

Further down the hill we came to a street-side shrine. There are a lot of these shrines in every neighborhood. They are about the size of a closet with minature altars, incense basins and stairs up to a little temple.

Next we came to a monastery. The gate was closed, but there was a monk on his motorcycle and his cell phone out front. The Buddha there was simply stone, but very large.

Then we crossed the rail lines into central Kobe. Central Kobe has a plethora of covered street malls, very upscale. We missed the first part of the street, but these go on for miles. The street mall in Kobe has a totally different feel than Namba. Kobe like I said is very western and upscale. I prefer the seedier feel of Namba, a little dirtier, a little more chaotic, much more authentic.

Chrissy and I searched for an Indian Restaurant, which we both saw when we got off the train, but could not find when we were hungry. We ended up eating Pizza. Neither of us can bring ourselves to eat unknown body parts in Japanese food. After dinner we went to Kobe’s Chinatown. It is not very big. It really does feel like Chinatown. I thought we were in San Francisco again.

We were exhausted by this point, so we headed back to the station. With a short detour through a Macy’s type department store with an rooftop English garden on the tenth floor. We took a little break there looking out over the lights of Kobe. Every time we go out, we forget that we have to ride our bikes back from our home station.

Chrissy never did get to see her Japanese Garden, but thank Buddha there is a temple or a shrine on every corner.