Kobe 2

Since we all slept late last night, everyone got a late start. I didn't sleep incredibly well, but it wasn't horrible either. My roomie was one of the Math teachers in the school, Mr. Eto. He took me downstairs for breakfast and then we met up with Mr. Kobayashi, and we ate a Japanese breakfast. It was fairly ok, since it tasted kinda weird, but still I shouldn't complain. It was a nice buffet and I could have had a western style, but they ate Naato... gross.

Then after breakfast we went to Kobe's Chinatown, or Nankin machi. We had the best nikuman there. It was the first introduced to Japan and is really famous. I mean it's so famous that there was a line waiting to get an order when we arrived and all the other places were empty. There weren't many people in Chinatown aside from the people waiting to buy the nikuman. It was good, but really really small. After that, there wasn't much to do so we went back to the port harbor for the lunch cruise.

It was of course on the Concerto ship, which is the same one I went on for the dinner cruise in October, but I was happy that it was Chinese food. I miss high quality Chinese food at a Chinese price. It's so expensive here. So I ate all the dim sum food and even had some hot Chinese wine that's very traditional. It was a nice cruise around the area. And it's much different in the day than at night.

After the cruise, Ms. Takagi gave me a gift from Universal Studios Japan. Last night it was raining a little bit so she bought an umbrella, but when she walked out of the store, it stopped raining. So, essentially it was a brand new umbrella and unused. She told me that this umbrella is used to ward off the rain and it's a lucky umbrella. She also let me know that my Japanese is improving, which is a GREAT thing since she's the one pushing me so hard to learn. It helps to get some reassurance and at least to be pleasing the boss.

Then after the cruise many people had to go back to Tokyo right away while some people had some time to hang out for another hour or so, and another group after that left. I left in the second group, so we went to the Kobe Port Tower to look at the view of the city. It was pretty good, probably not worth the 600 yen to get up there and then come immediately back down. But still it was something to do in that very short period of time. We also stopped by the Kobe Earthquake Memorial. 10 years ago Kobe experienced a very devastating Earthquake that left a Million people injured and killed over 100,000 people. It left the city pretty messed up with a billion dollars in damage. But now it was all built up again, and the memorial was a street that used to be there and all the street lamps on it's side and roads all cracked. We could only stay for 2 minutes before we had to run to find a taxi to get us to Shin-Kobe station. The taxi driver was a menace but got us to the station on time before our Shinkansen train left for Tokyo.

On the train, I was talking to Koyaya the whole time, while everyone else slept. We had a pretty good conversation in English and in Japanese. That was a lot of fun, but it was so hard for me to learn that my head started to hurt. But it was good. We were doing some pretty difficult math translations, since he's a math teacher. We arrived back to Shin-Yokohama station around 5pm and I told everyone yoiotoshio, which means see you next year. Since I won't be seeing anyone till next year, and well they will see each other tomorrow. That was pretty much it for me, since I just went home after that. But it was quite an adventure. I was happy that I had the opportunity to go too.