lunatic bumblebee

On Sunday my cousin had a Japanese language exam so we had to spend the morning alone. We went on a shopping tour near the Senri International House (SIH). First, we went to Jusco to check out the Japanese snacks and sweets. Jusco is something like Galeria Kaufhof or Karstadt where you can buy food as well as clothes and everything else you need to survive. At the children’s floor there was a corner with gaming machines. We played some drum game which we saw before at Umeda. I had lot’s of fun with that game, the music was so cute and although we couldn’t read the menu we quickly figured out how the game works.

After that we went back to the station near the SIH, had lunch and looked around in some little shops. I got a stuffed pig from Moritz. Then we went to a little cafe and even managed to order two coffees. While I was taking notes for the blog, Moritz had time to flip through a tankobon and read some manga. So cool that the cafe provides manga for their customers to read like magazines.

We made an appointment to meet the Vietnamese group at 3 pm however we ended up meeting them at 3.40 — Vietnamese mentality. It was planned to go to Kobe that evening to watch the Kobe Illumination. And I was really curious what that actually was, because nobody did really tell me about it. Fot the start we had kimchi ramen (noodle soup) and gyoza (fried dumplings — similar to wonton), to gain strength for the next step ^^. Moritz wanted to try Kobe beef, but a Kobe beef steak would have cost us more than USD 100. ^o^ (toooo expensive)
Stuffed and content we went on serpentines through the inner city to see the Kobe Illumination — kind of Christmas lights — with another thousand Japaneses. It took us a while to get to the lights and on our way we had to stop several times to get together the lost members of our group. At the end of the light road there was a street market with many food shops and I really wanted to try everything, but I knew I had to leave some space for my birthday cake — which my cousin bought along the way — he’s really too considerate.

After we walked several kilometres through Kobe we arrived at a little Café in a mall called Mosaic at the harbour. Normally, people praise the Japanese service, but here we found a counter example. At first, they didn’t let us light the candles and then they didn’t let us eat the cake. Additionally, their drinks and ice-cream were bad, too. And I thought it was weird, that the Café closed at 10 pm on Sundays. So we decided to eat the cake on a bench at the seaside. We also managed to light the candles (despite the wind) and discovered that we only had 25 minutes left to get the last train for Osaka. So it turned out to be somewhat like “power-cake-eating”.

Happy but tired I fell around 12 pm in my bed. In the last years I didn’t really celebrate my birthday, so it was very funny to have so many people around and even a cake. I’m so thankful that my cousin organized everything. The girl to get him will be very lucky ^^..

Anh Thu