The next day, we calculated the price of the family heading into town by subway, and driving in by car. For one or two people, Kobe’s public transport is sweetness. You can also pretty much walk from anyplace to any other place without too much difficulty. But in the end, for 4 adults and a child, the car is the way to go.

Oh, speaking of which, this rocks:

You can get this element installed in your glove compartment: You slide your credit card in. Then, when you travel on highways through toll booths, it automatically scans your device and deducts the correct amount, so you barely have to slow down. You even get a discount for using this over the coin toll (normally it costs 600 yen to go through the mountain tunnel pass to Kobe, with this it is just 450 yen).

Kobe is famous for a lot of things, but here’s the top few:

Kobe is famous for Western-style sweets, cakes and the like. It’s because it has a rich history of being an open port, so they’ve been doing cakes and snacks for longer than any other city in Japan.
Kobe is famous for sake: Good sake requires clean water, and the mountain springs of Kobe deliver the goods.
Kobe is famous for being richly international, again because of the open port thing.
So this day we “did” all three. Before lunch, we hit up a classical brewery and museum, and watched a video on how sake was classically made in Kobe (as well as took a tour of the place). Man, if I could travel through time, I’d totally be a fermentation director of a 1600s-era brewery. Anyway, it rocked, and I’ve got lots of pictures over in my Japan 2008 folder at Picasaweb. In short, it impressed the hell out of me, and not just the dozens of free samples they gave me.

What?

After the brewery, we headed to Kobe proper: Hit up the local NHK broadcasting office, passed a Mosque (beautiful architecture. The only problem is that before I left for Japan, I was playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed on the PS3, so my first instinct when I saw it was to climb up to the top and survey the land for evildoers), and visited a shopping arcade of small, distinctive crafts stores, all of which are housed in a building which used to be an elementary school (they even play up that fact, keeping a lot of the architecture the same, and posting pics of school life around the place).

On our way back to town, we passed a coffee house (apparently one of the most famous ones, I’m trying to hunt the name down), and through the window we saw the owner roasting some beans. Yasuaki is a huge coffee hound, and watching him watch the bean-roasting was like seeing a kid looking at the Macy’s Christmas window display or something. As we left, the often popped out and gave us a handful of Blue Mountain, which is a pretty high-end blend in Japan. Sweet!

After the coffee adventure, we went for cakes at a restaurant nearby. Gotta find the name of the place: Okiko, who knows her cakes, says that it’s hands-down the best cake place in Kobe. I’ve been to three cake specialty stores in Kobe, and I had to agree. Even now I still remember the taste of that heavenly tart. Better than anything I’ve had in the US, wow.


The picture doesn’t give it justice. It’s like that orgasm-tart from the second Matrix movie, but for both sexes.

I tried, I tried so hard to keep my stomach empty so that I could have two cakes (the proper method for the die-hard sweet-tooth). But man, one was enough. It hit the spot like an atomic bomb, and even though I had my eye on another, my taste buds were too shattered to be able to process another wonderful cake: I had room for it, but if I ate it it would have been “Ok”, and not “phantasmorgasmic”.

We were halfway home when Okiko said, “Oh, we should have just gotten another cake in a to-go box to eat later”. D’oh.

And that was Kobe. We got home, talked, partied with the cats, and got packed up and ready for the 24 hours of travel to get home.