Day 34 & 35: Kobe

[post of Friday 14^th of September 2012]

We spend the last days in Japan chilling out, buying some souvenirs, and doing the very last cultural trip we planned. We go to visit Kobe Museum with the hope of getting a chance to admire the collection of Nanban art in there which, among others items, houses Japanese Renaissance paintings made here in Japan four centuries ago. Unfortunately, we’re not lucky because the Nanban exhibition was open only in the first week of September. At least, we get the email of the curator and we can send him an email asking for the reproductions of the items we wanted to see.

Afterwards, the shopping is crazy. First, we go to Sannomiya Shopping Centre, in the heart of Kobe. This may be heaven for shop fanatics, but it results overwhelming for a couple of poor tired cyclists like us. Then, we move on to the Namba quarter, another shopping area in Osaka. Here it’s even crazier! In Namba streets you can find absolutely every kind of product and character!

On the way, we spot a bicycle shop and we take the chance to ask the favour (with the precious help of Kaccey as our interpreter) to save us a couple of cardboard boxes to pack the bikes back to Spain. We agree on meeting up again the next day. We get the boxes and wrap them in plastic. Then, with the constant company of the pouring rain, we bring them into the Kaccey’s and Bernardo’s house. Problem solved. Now there is something else we have to get sorted. We need to take a ferry which is leaving from a place 6 km away from here, but we cannot walk that distance with two huge boxes of 30 kg. we cannot even get there with the empty boxes on top of the bikes and, of course, there are not trains nor buses that serve the aim. Finally, Kaccey comes back to our help, makes a couple of calls, and arrange for a friend of her to take us directly to the bus stop with the bikes ready and packed. From there, we can get a bus that goes straight to the airport. In other words, and differently than when we arrived, we don’t have to go around pulling the huge boxes with the bicycles.

We fully enjoy the last suppers in Japan: the first one, fully Spanish (although we have a jamón that tastes a bit of salmon, and we end up calling it salmón serrano); the second supper, in a restaurant where you can cook your own dinner over the barbecue. When we leave Japan, we do so with a wonderful taste in our mouth.