Kobe is lovely. House construction aside, and the lowed temp from being in the mountains, Kobe/Hyogo prefetcure is a land of high mountains and deep valleys, forests everywhere. Looking around Gunma and the Kanto region, I can totaly see places where famous battles went down. In this area, though, one could barely imagine anything more than a single line of soldiers walking from one place to another. There’s no place for anything to happen.

Nowadays, it’s far more industrialized. Roads criss-cross the deep valleys, restaurants spot the rivers, and where there used to be enough room for a squad to march from one place to another, there’s a department store-ish/Target-ish place. The air is still fresh, though. The nights are dark. There’s still nature that can’t be developed on.

Kobe Saiko! Banzai!

Anyway, I spent the day exploring Kobe with Okiko and Yasuaki, but first it was kitty playtime:

Kikumaru likes sitting on peoples’ laps. And I love lap cats. Ahhhhhhhhh.

We went to lunch at a local French restaurant that was overlooking a cliff. The ewird thing is that when you look over the cliff from the parking lot, it’s like the top of a 4-story apartment complex…

What the hell? The left side… is a mountain. And the level that Orie and Yasuaki there are standing on is the ground floor, which means that the bottom floor is “-4″? In any case, we looked around for a bit but for the life of us we couldn’t tell where the people who lived there (had to be several dozen families) parked their cars… or how they even got down to their apartments. Secret elevator? In any case, it’s an interesting concept for an apartment, but you’re surrounded on all sides by tons of rock. I can’t imagine anyone with clausterphobia being able to stand it.

After the French restaurant, we went to Arima Onsen, which is like 10 minutes away by car or train from their place. While I don’t have any pictures of the place, it was really nice. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures.

The problem with hot springs arose again, though: Although they were “authentic”, they were too hot. Not just for the whitey, either: They had two baths at the hot spring I went to (a more famous one called “Kin no Yuu”/”The Springs of Gold”), one called “The hot bath”, one called “the warm bath”. There were 12 people, aged 5 to 80, all in the warm bath (which was still pretty hot) and not a single person in the hot bath. I hope in the future folks figure that shit out and make hot springs more like the sento that are achieving popularity recently.

At night, we cruised over to Kobe downtown, hit the Loft, and Orie fulfilled one of her shopping goals: going to the pillow specialty area and talking to a “pillow coordinator”, who helped her find a perfect pillow for her body type and sleep patterns.

There’s only a few places in the country (and the world) that have such a department/specialty. I thought it was kind of eccentric at first, but when I saw what they went through, I was impressed.  Orie got this awesome super pillow that’s like made up of four smaller pillows arranged like tetris pieces in a pillow-shell, all of which contain not feathers or soba kernels, but rather a kind of coal substance. Mission accomplished.

The next day we drove to town and wandered around all day.