Ricky Arrives in Kobe, Japan

First of all I don’t have internet in my room so I have to use the computer lab [link] at the school, which I am only able to utilize because my tutor was so kind as to provide me with his login and password, but I should have my internet up and running sometime this week. It’s a little inconvenient to make a 50 minute trip from my room to the school just to check emails and stuff, but on the other hand I enjoy riding the train as a Seattlite who has little train riding experience, and I get my fair share of “people-watching” which is always fun.

So for the first couple of weeks in Kobe I have been doing some sightseeing with some new friends from France and Germany. So far we checked out Sannomiya (sort of like “Downtown” if you will), the Rokko mountains, and a nice zoo.

In Sannomiya shopping is pretty much the only thing to do, and since David (the French guy) and myself are not really big on shopping we spent some time at the video arcades in Sannomiya. Though we have gotten pretty good at a game called “Tekken 5” we’re still no match for the Salarymen [link] who we compete against.

Kobe is an interesting city because to the South is the Pacific Ocean, and directly North are the Rokko Mountains. To get up to the good sightseeing areas of the hilltops we had to take a cable lift which brought us to a little shopping/sightseeing area at the top of the mountain. I’ll add those pictures as soon as I figure out how to get them off my phone. But for now the only pictures I have are from the zoo.

We had some free time so we decided to check out the zoo, it may seem a little childish but it was free to us because we got these touristy culture passes to get discounts. The zoo wasn’t really anything special, it was exactly how I would imagine a zoo would be like. But these culture passes are pretty handy and I’ll be sure to take some more pictures when visit other tourist spots in the future.