Week 6

This week's "Wednesday Adventure" saw the smallest turnout in a long while with only one other person coming along in the morning, one more joining in the afternoon, and a forth only coming for dinner.

In the morning the two of us headed over to the Kobe waterfront and visited "The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial". The route through the memorial starts on the forth floor with two movies; one showing re-creations of the destruction the 1995 earthquake caused and the other showing actual photos and film from that time with narration by a girl who lived through it. The second film had a lot of impact and was quite sad. The experience continues on the third floor with exhibits of items from the earthquake, more photos, and some text with statistics about the earthquake. There was also a large repository of personal recounts of the earthquake. This floor also had a guide who had okay English and guided us around. The second floor had some information about earthquakes in Japan and some small "experiments" you could do to learn more about them. All in all it was a nice memorial but not as instructional as the "disaster preparedness center" I visited in Tokyo a few years back.

After lunch we took the train down the waterfront a bit to the Nada ward of Kobe, which is famous for it's Sake breweries, and met our third tour-mate. Nada is a fairly large area so we tried our best to pick a good route to see as many breweries as possible. Unfortunately a combination of poor Japanese map making and the penchant of Japanese places to be closed on random weekdays foiled two of our prospects. The first brewery we stopped at (which we ended up asking a local for directions to) was the Takinokoi Kuramoto Club which turned out to be closed anyways. The second place we found on the map (Izumi Yunosuke Shoten) turned out to be someone's back yard, inhabited by a xenophobic old lady and a very barky dog. Third time was the charm as we located the Kobe Shu-shin-kan Brewery where, though we missed the day's 1 tour, we were treated to a nice video (in English) about Sake production followed by a sampling of a large variety of Sake. The staff here were really friendly and helpful and, even without the tour, it was a nice experience. Our last stop was the Hakatsuru Sake Brewery Museum (which I had previously visited a few years ago.) This place had a really nice museum which explains both the traditional and modern Sake brewing processes. Unfortunately the staff were a bit cool towards us which soured the experience a bit.

After a long afternoon of walking around we headed back into Osaka, to Dotonbori where we met up with another friend for dinner. We went to the Osaka outlet of "Chinese Cafe Eight" which I visited last year in Tokyo. As with the Tokyo version this shop had some... interesting decorations. In a final bit of odd luck for the day it turns out that we showed up on the evening of Chinese New Years and every table was booked. Fortunately the staff took pity on us and sat us at a table which had a later reservation, under the condition that we had a measly three hours to eat. As with the Tokyo vestion, this place also had great food at a reasonable price.

Rounding out the week I was fortunate enough to get two dates in with my lovely lady this week, including one at my favorite (literally) underground bar.

This next week has the "National Foundation Day" holiday on Friday which I'm combining with two of my paid holidays to get a nice REAL 3 day WEEKEND! I'll report back next week on how that goes...