Harbourside in Kobe

Female shamisen player
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Having remembered how awesome it was last year, i decided to grab a couple people (Lisa and Bjorn, 6'5 guy from tennessee) living in the international houses and head to Kobe for an entire day. Because of the earthquake in '95 the city is very new, very clean, and very attractive. We walked through the Chinatown there which, of course, was nothing special for Lisa and I, but for Bjorn it was cool, he didn't even know what a BBQ pork bun was. I found a place where you could buy fakes of Bruce Lee's jumpsuit from game of death but that was about the only cool thing about that area. We found an area of the city where if you take a picture and omit things that are typical of Japan, you'd swear it were taken in Italy. For some reason these 3 buildings were all very Italian styled and all next to one another with no indications (signs etc) that they were japanese.

Kobe Tower in all its moonlit glory
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However, Kobe's Harbourland is by far the best part of the city. It's spacious, has great architecture and design, and is generally just great for hanging out at. I talked to some Japanese flatland BMX riders who were there and they knew many of the same names i know from Vancouver.  Afterwards we checked out the shopping area at harbourland and ate dinner at Bikkuri Donkey. Bikkuri means "surprise" so i'm not sure if it's 'donkey surprise' or '[a] surprised donkey' i'm hoping neither really, but they serve what i can only describe as hamburgers except just the beef patty. It's more like eating meatloaf than anything because the 'patties' are huge, and they taste awesome, plus the place has some good prices. Following dinner we checked out this CD release performance by a shamisen and a flute player (apparently there was some big music festival going on that weekend, i think they must have one every weekend somewhere in Japan because we caught one in Kyoto a couple weeks prior). They were both promoting their own CDs but decided to do a collaborative show and i gotta say i was very very impressed. The woman playing the shamisen was the more amazing of the two, but the flute player was excellent as well. Their final song had a backing track so it would sound more like something off one of their CDs, and at that point the full moon (this was the night of the chinese moon festival as well) came out from behind the clouds and, combined with the beauty of the Kobe harbourland's night view, made for a near perfect sensual experience.

1 or 2 years in Japan is fine, but after 5 or 6 he started to get homophobic

Screwin around in Tokyu Hands Dept. Store
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On our way home we hit up the Umeda sky building in downtown Osaka (crazy looking 40+ story building) so i could show Lisa and Bjorn what urban sprawl truly is. When you're at the top you see city...and that's it even though you're on the 43rd floor. It's truly impressive, but also kind of scary to look at that kind of urban jungle. I went up last year, but it was great again this year, and i'd probably go up again. At the bottom of the building was some sort of international fair which ended up in a bunch of Europeans getting drunk and spilling beer everywhere. We were up at the top of the building when the fair was ending so we, along with all those drunkards, walked to the station. While on the train we met one of them named Laurence, from England. He claims to have lived in Japan for 11 years, but his Japanese is awful. He tried to speak it on the train to some blind japanese guy (who kept his balance the whole way, despite the sometimes violent shaking of the train!) and could hardly get through his sentences. The best line of the night though was when this laurence guy told his that 1 or 2 years in Japan is fine, but after 5 or 6 he started to get homophobic (homesick)....We all made eye contact and then just started laughing for a solid minute or so, and he had no idea why, and still doesn't.