Adventures in Japan

Not nearly as adventurous as juggling fire

Wow. It's been a while since either of us wrote anything. If I didn't know better, I might suspect we'd met with some foul end, possibly involving the Japanese underworld, or maybe Godzilla. Sorry guys, nothing so interesting.

We've been to Kobe twice since the last time we posted, but we didn't see a single pampered cow. We just sort of wandered around and ate stuff. Kind of like what we do in Osaka, Except farther west. Kobe was pretty much levelled by an earthquake in 1995, so the rebuilt city has a bit of a "new" feeling to it. Nice, but kind of bland. It does have a Chinatown, though. Not quite like what we think of as a Chinatown at home. Instead of a mishmash of Chinese, Korean, Japanese and whatever other Asian stuff you might care to cram in there, everything seemed to be singularly Chinese. Mostly food and trinkets (you know, like Chinese dresses, cheap toys, and all things panda-related). Much of the food was sold from little stalls lining the streets. Crowds stood around eating, or waiting in line (some of those stalls were really popular). We ate in a little restaurant in behind one of the stalls. The food we ordered was nothing we'd ever seen in a Chinese restaurant before. Either it was very authentic, or modified to suit Japanese tastes. I'm leaning toward the latter, but either way, it tasted really good.


Inspired by the "Italian" sandwich and pasta from the other day, and the "Chinese" food that followed, on Sunday we indulged in a little Thai dining. We were hoping to make it to our restaurant of choice in time for the all-you-can-eat buffet, but we were much too late for that. We ate there anyway, enjoyed it, then went back for the buffet a couple days later. We so got our money's worth. Yum. We walked out of the Thai place to see this:


which was a shame, really. Post buffet, we were too full for giant crépes. Now we are waiting for coming to the shop. We have it on authority that when we do, it will be very well.