Proof of Attendance
After the opening of the conference, which I will report on separately, I skipped out, caught the train back to downtown, and wandered around some more.
The arrival times are all digital but the actual times are analog
I wanted an authentic Japanese lunch experience, so I stopped at a noodle bar, the kind where you stick coins in a machine and it gives you a ticket that you give to the heavily made-up counter lady, who gives you your udon. For 280yen I had something called ‘kitsune’. kitsune means ‘fox’, but I think it was really beef. I later learned that it’s a Kobe region specialty. It was very good.
The Udon Lady
My main target was ShinKobe, the Shinkasen station for Kobe.
ShinKobe Station, home of the bullet train
It’s about a 20 minute walk from the hotel. One of the interesting things about Kobe is that they have lots of pedestrian walkways,
Pedestrian crossovers, behind the hat
so that you don’t have to wait at the intersection, and some of them are quite complex because if you have 6 streets meeting, you need a bunch of different walkovers.
Walking up, I took the main street, Flower Street.
Flower Street
It’s a typical Japanese thoroughfare (he said, based on 36hrs of observation), with typical stores and shops and public art.
Children may play here
Japanese stores remind me of old junk stores, only much cleaner and brighter. Narrow aisles stacked ceiling-high with an incredible array of goods,with everything marked bright signs with big block letters. Most of the places I went into were in narrow narrow buildings, and the shop went up four or five stories of 15×15′ display rooms. I bought a couple of kids manga, nothing ecchi, to practice my translating on.
Other buildings are not what they seem. According to other blogs, many of the buildings that look to be Christian churches are really just commercial shells, available for rent by couples who want a Western Style wedding, presided over by whichever of their foreign friends owns a black suit. Here is a fake Greek building. You’d think it might be a bank or something. It’s not. It’s another wedding center.
The Marriage Center
The Shinkasen station backs right up against the hills. From that aspect, Kobe reminded me a little of downtown Portland. The building to the left is the start of the Mt. Maya ropeway, of which more tomorrow.
ShinKobe Station and Portland-style hills
The station was a little confusing because nowhere could I find a map of the system to tell me what train to take to Kyoto. It turns out it was the Tokyo train, I think. I figured I would find out on Friday. Returning to the hotel, I wandered the back streets and residential districts. You can get a car in here, but from one direction only.
Hillside homes
December 10, 2012 at Mon, 10 Dec 2012 09:53:30 +0000 |
I see a lot of western-style architecture (including neo-classic) mixed in. I like the “user interface” for the train station arrivals board–makes it very easy to distinguish between train times and current time without thinking about it. Very sensible.
December 15, 2012 at Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:39:25 +0000 |
[...] and backfill with detail when I had a chance and a useful keyboard. I have now done that for days Three and Four. Next up, Day Five, parts 1 and [...]