This school year has been a pretty splendid as far as traveling is concerned. We ventured to Guam and the Philippines for holiday during winter break. This past week or so, during Chinese New Year, we took our first, but certainly not last, foray into Japan – specifically Kobe, Japan.
We kept a base out of Osaka and used the incredibly efficient Japan Rail to get from one place to another…so convenient. We left on January 31, Chinese New Year’s Day, I suppose you’d call it, and the pollution was unbelievably high. Whether this was due to the thousands of fireworks going off or the factories getting in a last push before the break, we managed to make it out of Pudong. However, we did sit on the tarmac for about an hour and a half. We had a layover in Dalian (northern China) and just barely made our connecting flight to Osaka.
Our hostel had a little party on our first night in Osaka, and we tried some homemade Japanese soup. I think was a simple Japanese version of chicken noodle, but with some tofu and a few other things thrown in. It was delightful, especially when paired with the $2 Asahi tall boys from our hostel’s vending machine. We also met a few locals at the party, one of whom we met up with later. He took us to a local sushi place for an excellent authentic Japanese-style sit down (more on that in a later post).
We woke up the following day, and after a confusing 30 minutes on the train platform, we managed to hop on a ride to Kobe. Kobe feels considerably smaller than the 1.5 million people that Wikipedia says live there, but it was pretty beautiful. We walked over to another train station, and beyond that, we were in the foothills of the mountains with lots of trails at our disposal.
I’d read there was a waterfall around, so we hiked over the mountainside for an hour before setting out to find the waterfall. It wasn’t as large as we had hoped when we found it. However, it was quiet, peaceful, beautiful, and, most of all, lovely to escape the noise and pollution of Shanghai!
After hiking back down, we thought we’d take a gondola ride up to the top of the mountain. The glorious ride offered stunning views of Kobe and the bay beyond.
When we reached the top, there was a giant herb garden you could walk down. It wasn’t overly exciting since there wasn’t much growing in the middle of winter. However, they did have an indoor greenhouse, which was nice, but the best part was the free herbal foot bath they had at the lookout point.
We were hungry then, so we set out to find some sushi. We found a nice little place that wasn’t overly crowded but still had many locals. We had some delicious sushi and continued walking and exploring Kobe on foot. On an interesting note, it was curious to see that in Kobe and other places in Japan, Tully’s Coffee was alive and well!
Anyways, Dear Readers, enjoy and look out for more posts on Japan coming soon.