Wednesday my friends and I went down to Kobe to meet a couple of other foreigners who are were in the area. One of them was a JET teaching English in Nagasaki, but touring the area around Kyoto (Kansai, which includes Osaka, Nara, Kobe and others) while the other is currently studying at Osaka University. Well, we had decided to go visit Kobe’s ‘Nanking Town’ in hopes of scoring some Dim Sum, my absolute favourite type of food. Well, Nanking Town is not very big, only a couple of blocks long with not many side streets, and very expensive, especially since I’m used to Boston or San Francisco Chinatown prices. 600yen for one (5-piece) order of shumai is ridiculous, especially when they aren’t even all that good. Well, the people selling from stands on the street were a little less expensive, but as it was terribly hot we resigned ourselves to eating in one of the restaurants, where we could at least get out of the sun. This is where I had the never-ending bowl of ramen. As part of a ‘set meal’ at the restaurant, I got a bowl of ramen. Now, ramen noodles tend to be tangled together in one dense mass when they first arrive, which means that you have to kind of work them free in order to eat them. Well, because of this, it seemed that the more of this ramen I ate, the more noodles were in my bowl. I just kept eating and eating (not very good) ramen until I couldn’t eat another bite, and yet my bowl was still full. It was like some sort of nightmare. Well, after our lunch adventure, we walked down an extremely long shopping arcade in the area. I didn’t know this before coming, but apparently Kobe is famous for its proliferation of shoe stores. I have never seen so many shoe stores in one location before. Sadly, my feet are too big for most all Japanese shoes, so I was not able to buy a souvenir pair of Kobe shoes, but I did buy an amazingly bright blue-green fedora. After our shopping half of the group went home and the rest of us decided to do an hour of karaoke, which was fun, and then head to Umeda in Osaka, because I needed to buy an external hard drive. With my new hard drive in-hand, we wandered around for awhile looking for a place to have dinner, though by this point I was exhausted. We found a really nice and reasonable Italian restaurant across from the Umeda Arts Theatre, which had very tasty garlic bread, but I was unfortunately faced for the second time that day a bowl of noodles that I simply could not finish. When I got home it was all I could do to get up the energy to take my shower before falling into bed.
-Kobe has traditionally had a lot of foreigners, so in addition to a Chinatown, it also has some old mansions that European traders used to own. I’ll have to look into them next time.
-I had thought that the vendors on the street were fairly cheap until I realized that I’d never pay almost a dollar for a single sesame ball in the states, and would definitely not pay $4 for a moon cake
-Afternoon karaoke is amazingly cheap: for an hour it was 220yen per person, whereas an hour in the evening can come to easily 1000yen per person.
-Most karaoke machines only have a small number of mostly older Takarazuka songs, but there is apparently one in Osaka that has tons of songs, including some from the shows that I’ve been to since being here. We’re going later next week.
-I never want to eat ramen again.
-Yodobashi Camera in Osaka Umeda has 320GB external hard drives for 10,090yen, which is just under $100.
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