A Day in: Kobe

A couple of weeks ago I visited Kobe for the first time. Kobe is the sixth-largest city in Japan - smaller than Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokohama, but larger than Kawasaki. Kobe is known as a fairly pleasant city to live in, quite modern, with a harbour and some foreign influence. In these respects, it's not unlike Yokohama.

When I went to Kobe, I did a lot of walking! First, from Sannomiya station (20 minutes from Osaka), I went to Kitanocho, an area with lots of historical foreign residences. It was all built up and down hills, with the mountains immediately behind, creating a nice natural backdrop. The area itself was lovely, and full of little cafes, snack and souvenir shops.

This is a Starbucks with class ^_^

After exploring Kitanocho (no, I didn't go to the Starbucks, but I found a nice French restaurant/cafe on the same street), I went back down to Sannomiya station. Checking the maps, it seemed like only a 400m walk from the station to the Chinatown/harbour area, so I decided not to take the train. Of course, after walking for 400m, I soon found a sign telling me the harbour was 1.2km away. This kind of confusion happens to me often in Japan. Am I really so bad at reading maps and signs, or are they just toying with me? Hahaha...

Anyway, I still walked down to Chinatown, past a floral clock and a park. The Chinatown was mostly concentrated on one street, but it was pretty cool. They had stalls selling shumai (dumplings), nikuman (steamed meat buns) karaage (deep-fried chicken), harumaki (spring rolls) and other treats. Om nom nom. I enjoyed some freshly prepared shumai.

Finally I made it to Meriken Park, a park overlooking the harbour. In this park is a memorial for the great Kobe earthquake of 1995. I just sat and watched some dudes riding stunt bikes.

I made my way on to Harborland, which had nice views. This complex reminded me of Darling Harbour in Sydney, or possibly Decks in Odaiba, Tokyo.

Kobe harbour

There were lots of great department stores in this area, with interesting novelty stores and funky layouts and decor, like little canals. I stopped at a cafe for coffee and cheesecake; their specialty of the house was a unique 'Denmark-style cheesecake'. I don't know what the Danish would have thought of this thing, but it came out with *hot melted cheese* all over it. Underneath it was a kind of generic, Japanese-style spongy cheesecake. It wasn't bad, per se, but rather unexpected.

I enjoyed my day in Kobe. And I did feel like Kobe was Yokohama's western cousin. In both cities, you have:

• the area with cool little cafes, former foreign residential areas with European architecture' (in Yokohama: Motomachi/Yamate; in Kobe: Kitanocho)
• the harbourside, with nice places to sit, and lots of shops (in Yokohama: Minato Mirai, in Kobe: Harborland and Meriken Park)
• the 'bigger neighbour' city which is an easy train ride away (Yokohama has Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka)
• Chinatown (the Yokohama one is much bigger, but the Kobe one has more emphasis on street stalls selling hot snacks, which was nice ^_^)
• a generally bright, modern feel with lots of shiny, tall buildings

Actually, I liked Kobe very much, and I thought that if I wanted to try living in a new place in Japan, I'd probably choose Kobe. It seemed much livelier than Nagoya, and I found lots of nice cafes, bakeries and patisseries, as well as many department stores, some open spaces, and nice restaurants.