Trip to Kobe

During the first week of November, there was a festival at my university, which meant that I was able to have a bit of a holiday. Ayako and I decided to head down to the city of Kobe for two days. We started off walking around the downtown area and quickly found a nice shrine:

We had heard that Kobe is an international city. We were amazed though at the number of gift stores selling items from one country or another. Most were from European countries but we even found a whole Muslim area with a number of restaurants and stores as well as a mosque in the area:
For lunch, we had a great recommendation from our friend Sabrina about a steakhouse called Steak Aoyama. We went there to try some Kobe beef. Here's our appetizer salad along with some Croatian beer that the chef recommended:
As for the main course, Ayako and I split a sirloin steak and a fillet steak (tenderloin) to see which we liked best:
Here's the chef cooking the food in front of us:
Since we are in Japan, he cut up the meat into bite-sized pieces so that chopsticks could be used. We had ordered our meat to be cooked medium-rare, and so each bite-sized piece was cooked medium-rare. The bread being toasted on the side was also very delicious:
Here was our meal, still on the stove to keep it warm:
The meat was very delicious and we both decided that we preferred fillet over sirloin steak. There was salt that we coat dip the meat into which had come from the Andes. They had a rock of salt beside the grinder to show us where it had come from:
In the afternoon, we continued looking around in the small stores downtown. Later on, we caught a small train to go to a small island next to Kobe. We could see the many cranes in the harbour for the boats. Ayako thought the cranes all looked like giraffes:
We found that there was an Ikea on the island, so we went for a look around to see if it differed much from the ones back home:
Most of the furniture was the same as in Canada although the furniture and things for the bathrooms were quite different. We had a small dinner in their cafeteria, which was huge and had lots of comfortable sofas to sit on:
At night, we went for a walk through Chinatown, which had lots of decorative lights along the streets:

Even the vending machine was decorated:
The next day we went for a walk through the historic area of Kobe, which has lots of historic foreign houses in it:


There were some houses that had been badly damaged during the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 that had been left and not repaired. This is a beautiful stained-glass window of a Persian building that had become overgrown in plants since the earthquake:
Since the historic area is up steep hills in Kobe, it wasn't long before you'd get thirsty. The entire area is residential, so some houses had set up vending machines outside the houses to capitalize on this small market:
We even found a Starbucks that had renovated a historic building:
There were seven rooms that you could choose from to have your coffee in. We were lucky to get one small room to ourselves. I think it was a small study previously:
With the hilly roads and the many cats that we saw, Kobe reminded me a bit of our trip to Kanazawa:
We found another cute cat at a shine that was up a steep staircase:
There was a wonderful view from the top:
We could even have a good view of some of the houses in the historic area:
...as well as a great view of the city:

In the afternoon, we went for a bus tour of the city, which let us see the rest of the city that we had missed:

After that, we headed back to the train station to get a bullet train back home. We had a great time in Kobe and were pleasantly surprised how much the city had to offer. We both agreed that it was the most pleasant of the large cities we had been to in Japan.