What with all the craziness I never got around to writing about my winter break, which deserves addressing since it was pretty sweet.
Around the end of my fall break, some of us realized that winter break was about a month off, and that if we wanted to do stuff, we should probably start planning before finals rolled around and hotels started getting booked and stuff. At this point, two of the participants of our Tokyo trip knew that their boyfriends were coming to visit and they’d be *ahem* preoccupied with them so they wouldn’t be going on any trips with the rest of us. By that point it was four of us, and one of my other friends states that she can’t really be out and about for more than a few days, and that a two week long trip, which is what we kind of wanted to do, wouldn’t work for her. At that point things looked grim because it was three of us and we couldn’t decide on what to do.
One of my friends had the idea to go around Kyuushu, which neither I nor my other friend reacted too strongly too, and we all had different ideas about how long we wanted the trip to be. Things were about to fall apart when my other friend said she wanted to go to Sendai, which is in Northern Honshu, and my friend and I discussed if there was anything we wanted to do, when she suggested going around Western Honshu. For some reason this really appealed to me, because the format of the trip would be to make a circuit around Western Honshu and just check out whatever seemed interesting to us.
Thus, I looked up the section on Western Honshu and basically skimmed it, looking at the highlights of various areas and deciding what would be cool to go see. I ended up with a list of things that could keep us occupied for three weeks or so if we had wanted to take our time, but we only had two weeks to work with, and a limited budget, so we drew up a schedule which, once finalized, had us set to go on a 12 day trip around Western Honshu.
One thing I was worried about was our hotel situation. I figured that since it was around the holidays, there might be a lot of people staying in some of the places we were planning on going to, but we got reservations in a bunch of youth hostels, and ultimately we got what were supposed to be good, cheap accommodations, according to my guidebook.
Finals ended on the 22nd of December, and my friend and I set out on our trip the next morning. I made my way to Shijo, then took the Hankyuu line down to Katsura, where my friend usually gets on the train to go up to Imadegawa. She got on the train I was on and we met up inside, then settled down while the train headed to our first destination: Kobe.
As foreigners, we naturally don’t know much about any given country aside from our own unless we’ve taken the time to inform ourselves. One of those things that people who know bullocks about Japan know about Japan is that there’s a thing called Kobe beef which is really expensive and comes from Japan. However, that’s not all that’s in Kobe. Our first stop was at the youth hostel where we would be staying for one night. Japan has an abundance of youth hostels, so there’s bound to be at least one no matter where you’re going, unless you’re going to the middle of nowhere.
Our hostel in Kobe was actually a 20 minute train ride away from downtown Kobe, which, in a condensed place like Japan, is actually kinda far. We were hoping to drop off our bags and return later to check in, but they let us check in before the appointed time, and we got ourselves situated. We were in a small room with a bunk bed setup and an air conditioning unit. We left our things there and headed out to do things in Kobe.
I previously mentioned that I looked up cool stuff to do in various places, but we had a way of doing things on this trip. On our Tokyo trip, we more or less had every moment of every day planned out, which let us do a bunch of stuff, but it was exhausting and honestly made some things a bit less fun. So what we decided to do this time was compile a list of things we would want to do, maybe enough to occupy us for the amount of time we would be spending there, but not commit ourselves to doing anything. We would get somewhere, decided what we wanted to do, and do it. If we wanted to do one thing then go back to our room and watch a movie, we’d do that. The idea was to give ourselves the chance to explore when we wanted to, or to rest when we needed to.
In Kobe we didn’t have much on the list of things to do (one of them was simply, “BEEF,” which we never got around to doing). There’s supposedly a really cool looking Fashion Museum…and that’s about it. Aside from that there might be a couple more museums, beef, and temples and stuff. We didn’t have much time there anyway, so we decided to try and go up on a ropeway to the top of a nearby mountain and check out the scenery. We took the subway to the stop near the ropeway, and tried to navigate our way over to it, only to find out that it was closed for renovations.
With that plan thoroughly foiled, we moved on to our next plan, which was checking out a church and a temple, both of which were thoroughly unremarkable. By that time it was getting dark, so we decided to move on to our next big plan in Kobe, which was going up the Port Tower, a tower that stands at the waterfront of Kobe. We approached it from downtown and got a good look at it as we did. The Tower isn’t particularly huge, I mean it’s tall, but it doesn’t overshadow everything around it. It has a lot of lights on it though, with practically every crossbeam covered in lights.
Before we went up the tower we noticed something of a one man circus show going on close by. We stopped on a raised walkway and observed this one man circus act, not because it was particularly astounding, but because the man who was doing it had the most atrocious accent I’ve ever heard. If you’ve ever seen anime with foreigners in it, you’ll be familiar with this kind of accent, but for those who don’t watch anime, the voice actors for the foreigners are always Japanese, but in order to convey that these people are actually foreigners (and to reinforce the stereotype of the stupid foreigners) they speak in a very specific accent where their intonation is practically the opposite of what it should be. That was what this guy sounded like.
Just like how I can’t sit through comedy that involves people being horrible at music because it’s so uncomfortable for me to listen to, this accent was horrible to the point where I was cringing at how horrifically wrong this guy’s intonation was. It was so bad, that he was probably doing it on purpose in order to attract more attention and get more money, because his Japanese, aside from the accent, was actually pretty good. His grammar was good, there were some parts that I couldn’t understand because he used vocab and grammar that I don’t know yet, and he even used some keigo, which is the most polite form of speech you can use. Hell, he might not have even been a foreigner, we were too far away to see his face.
Anyway, after he was done, we went up the tower to admire the view, which was kinda meh, to be honest, but it was still pretty fun. The viewing floor was neatly lit with dim, darker colored lights, and it set a nice mood for viewing the city at night. The port was nice to look at as there was a kind of shopping mall that was interestingly lit, and there was even a pirate ship lit up with green lights that was coming back in to dock.
After the tower we got dinner at a cafe, went back to our room and watched a movie. I will end this post here, since it is late and I have much more to write about.
Shimon
