Japanese Honeymoon: Kobe
Mar. 7th, 2012 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mofetteWe decided to arrive really early into Kobe, so that we could go on to see some sights further down the train line. We walked to the hotel, all too easily due to Google maps, and they gladly took our luggage, and let us go back out for the day.
We travelled on the train to Hikone, one of only 8 original castles still standing in Japan (We wanted to go to Himeji, but it is currently under a massive tent for conservation work). As we got to Hikone, it was still really early, and the weather was a bit rainy, so there weren’t many people around. The walk down to the castle was quiet – all the shops and restaurants hadn’t opened yet, thwarting our plan of eating breakfast on the way over! When we arrived, the castle was in quite a large piece of land, surrounded by a moat.
Hikone castle is quite a humble structure, it doesn’t impose over the surrounding land like others, and you could be forgiven for not seeing it! The winding entrance road to the castle is still there, taking you past little windows for arrows and chutes for boiling oil! There are a lot of steps too, and after having climbed Mount Misen, that was tough, we were still aching! As we climbed the steps it became evident that the age group of the visitors was slightly different to anything we were used to – most people visiting were OAPs!
Once we got to the top of the keep, it was so worth it! The castle was amazing. We entered through the side and took our shoes off, placing them in a plastic bag to save the wooden floors inside. We wandered through, looking at the views through the tiny windows of Hikone. Once we got to the main building, all the crowds came to a stop, and we queued to get to the top level. The stairs were almost a ladder at this point, and to stop it from getting too crowded up there, we had to wait.
All in all there wasn’t a lot to see, the windows had chicken wire on them and there wasn’t any replica rooms or anything, just bare floorboards and walls and a lot of people queuing.
On the way back down to the museum, there was a guide dressed as Hikone-nyan. Hikone-nyan is a cat, dressed in the helmet from the samurai armour in the castle. He’s really cute and I was getting a bit giddy, so I asked him for a hug and he obliged, much to the amusement of several school kids nearby!
We went to the museum, and as we had been warned, there wasn’t anything in English. I picked up one of the Japanese leaflets in each room, intending to do some translating, but as Edwardscissors knows, my translating is a SLOW business :( When we walked around, it turned out that a better version of Hikone-nyan was going to be in a little meeting session in 15 minutes, so we bombed round the final part and stood in the queue to join 50 other people watching some guy in a suit dance around and pretend to be a cat! I videoed the whole performance, which was as tooth-rottingly cute as you’d think it would be, but once we finished, it turned out that the camera wasn’t on :(
When we got outside, we played peek-a-boo with a small child, who as normal was scared of the huge western devils, and then took ourselves back through the town to the station. We again tried to get something to eat, but we couldn’t decide, so made an executive decision to grab some snacks from the convenience store underneath the station, and then eat proper once we were back in Kobe.
Once back in Kobe, we checked into the hotel properly, and grabbed all these tiny little moo-card sized money off vouchers from the lobby, and started properly looking into eating Kobe beef in Kobe.
Throughout our stay, people had asked where we were going, and when we’d told them Kobe, they had always asked why. When we explained that we wanted to eat Kobe beef, they explained that we could eat it anywhere, and it would be just as good. We looked at reviews online, checked the vouchers we had and decided on 2 restaurants. We took the train down to the city and wandered around, looking for these restaurants to no avail. We were in the dodgiest parts of Kobe, with no idea what we were looking for! We also had no cash for today, so we were looking for someone that took credit cards (which isn’t many places in Japan) as the ATMS were shut as it was Sunday!
Add to this the fact that it was tipping it down with rain, and we had a couple of minor arguments, finally accepting that Japanese beef would be awesome anywhere, and we couldn’t really justify spending a hundred quid on dinner. We decided to go to a little izakaya that we’d seen on the way around in the morning that had offered beer at &jpy;200! We walked in, took off our shoes and put them in a locker, and went upstairs.
Mostly we were left alone here which was nice – I had my tattoos out and I heard a couple of mutters, but we sat and drank, before I decided finally to try a sukiyaki! I’d never had one before in all the times I’d been to Japan, so once I saw one on the menu, I asked the nice waiter how to do it, and we ate gyoza and actually some Kobe beef until we were stuffed!
We travelled on the train to Hikone, one of only 8 original castles still standing in Japan (We wanted to go to Himeji, but it is currently under a massive tent for conservation work). As we got to Hikone, it was still really early, and the weather was a bit rainy, so there weren’t many people around. The walk down to the castle was quiet – all the shops and restaurants hadn’t opened yet, thwarting our plan of eating breakfast on the way over! When we arrived, the castle was in quite a large piece of land, surrounded by a moat.
Hikone castle is quite a humble structure, it doesn’t impose over the surrounding land like others, and you could be forgiven for not seeing it! The winding entrance road to the castle is still there, taking you past little windows for arrows and chutes for boiling oil! There are a lot of steps too, and after having climbed Mount Misen, that was tough, we were still aching! As we climbed the steps it became evident that the age group of the visitors was slightly different to anything we were used to – most people visiting were OAPs!
Once we got to the top of the keep, it was so worth it! The castle was amazing. We entered through the side and took our shoes off, placing them in a plastic bag to save the wooden floors inside. We wandered through, looking at the views through the tiny windows of Hikone. Once we got to the main building, all the crowds came to a stop, and we queued to get to the top level. The stairs were almost a ladder at this point, and to stop it from getting too crowded up there, we had to wait.
All in all there wasn’t a lot to see, the windows had chicken wire on them and there wasn’t any replica rooms or anything, just bare floorboards and walls and a lot of people queuing.
On the way back down to the museum, there was a guide dressed as Hikone-nyan. Hikone-nyan is a cat, dressed in the helmet from the samurai armour in the castle. He’s really cute and I was getting a bit giddy, so I asked him for a hug and he obliged, much to the amusement of several school kids nearby!
We went to the museum, and as we had been warned, there wasn’t anything in English. I picked up one of the Japanese leaflets in each room, intending to do some translating, but as Edwardscissors knows, my translating is a SLOW business :( When we walked around, it turned out that a better version of Hikone-nyan was going to be in a little meeting session in 15 minutes, so we bombed round the final part and stood in the queue to join 50 other people watching some guy in a suit dance around and pretend to be a cat! I videoed the whole performance, which was as tooth-rottingly cute as you’d think it would be, but once we finished, it turned out that the camera wasn’t on :(
When we got outside, we played peek-a-boo with a small child, who as normal was scared of the huge western devils, and then took ourselves back through the town to the station. We again tried to get something to eat, but we couldn’t decide, so made an executive decision to grab some snacks from the convenience store underneath the station, and then eat proper once we were back in Kobe.
Once back in Kobe, we checked into the hotel properly, and grabbed all these tiny little moo-card sized money off vouchers from the lobby, and started properly looking into eating Kobe beef in Kobe.
Throughout our stay, people had asked where we were going, and when we’d told them Kobe, they had always asked why. When we explained that we wanted to eat Kobe beef, they explained that we could eat it anywhere, and it would be just as good. We looked at reviews online, checked the vouchers we had and decided on 2 restaurants. We took the train down to the city and wandered around, looking for these restaurants to no avail. We were in the dodgiest parts of Kobe, with no idea what we were looking for! We also had no cash for today, so we were looking for someone that took credit cards (which isn’t many places in Japan) as the ATMS were shut as it was Sunday!
Add to this the fact that it was tipping it down with rain, and we had a couple of minor arguments, finally accepting that Japanese beef would be awesome anywhere, and we couldn’t really justify spending a hundred quid on dinner. We decided to go to a little izakaya that we’d seen on the way around in the morning that had offered beer at &jpy;200! We walked in, took off our shoes and put them in a locker, and went upstairs.
Mostly we were left alone here which was nice – I had my tattoos out and I heard a couple of mutters, but we sat and drank, before I decided finally to try a sukiyaki! I’d never had one before in all the times I’d been to Japan, so once I saw one on the menu, I asked the nice waiter how to do it, and we ate gyoza and actually some Kobe beef until we were stuffed!
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 07:40 pm (UTC)I like "had my tattoos out" as a metaphor. And also as tattoos.
Your experience with being questioned about why you were going to Kobe is funny and sad at the same time. It reminds me of how it seems like no matter what foreign country you visit in the world, when you tell the locals "oh, I cannot wait to [do this one thing!]" you so often get "why would you ever [do any of the things you are excited about?]" in response.
Of course, sometimes it would help to have good advice from locals, like when I thought Luton sounded like a fun place to visit.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 07:59 pm (UTC)oh hang on
FUCK LUTON!
no subject
Date: 2012-03-08 05:16 pm (UTC)