Holiday in Japan (Day 8)

We awoke at 7.15 and bathed. The shower was good, but the bath was lukewarm so I did not even bother getting in it. We watched a little (strange) children’s TV, before paying and departing. We left our bags in the room, and the housekeeper told to keep the key until we returned for them. We wandered around and found the necessary bakery (I had an iced pastry with walnut topping) before going to information centre (open by now) for some maps.
We headed north and found Ijinkan, a group of western houses. We entered Rhine House as it was free. It was nothing special, though there was a lot of information about pearls for some reason, and some photos of the damage caused by the 1995 earthquake. We looked at the outside of a few of the others as well. A nice, Japanese “volunteer tour guide” approached us and told us a little about the houses in English. We also enjoyed the blooming sakura around the area. We avoided the shrine with an expensive entrance fee, and I withdrew some more money from a post office.

We returned to Shin-Kobe station area where we caught a ropeway up the mountain. There were herds of amateur photographers at the top; so many that we gave up waiting for them to take their photos. We walked down through the herb garden, containing some pretty flowers, and a large green house with exotic plants, like bananas. We walked down the rest of the mountain, my foot still hurting. It was a steep walk, with some beautiful views. We took a wrong turning and ended up climbing an extremely steep hill for 15 minutes, before finding a sign pointing us back the way we came. Despite the urge to complete conquering the hill, we turned back. Agony! Eventually, we made it back to the bottom, seeing a giant dam, its lake, and a few cool waterfalls one the way.

We wandered back to the hotel to pick up our bags before having lunch (yet another katsu-don). Then, from the Hankyū-Kobe line station, we caught a train to Umeda in Ōsaka. At a bakery in the station, we made more purchases. Mine this time was some kind of apple-cake. From Umeda we caught the subway to Tanimachi-4-chōme via Honmachi. A short walk brought us to Ōsaka-jō (大阪城 - Osaka castle). Most of it seems to have been destroyed in the civil war before being rebuilt, though (much like every other building in Japan). We managed to weave our way to outside the castle through some old gates, and passed some very large stones in the walls, some kind of garden festival (dioramas made of plants), and magic tricks. We sat on one of the defensive walls, facing the castle and ate our apple treats. There was a man with a strange, tiny animal: a sort of cross between a rabbit, a dog, and a Meer cat. It followed him around, generally performing and showing off, attracting the attention of nary a passer-by. Across the moat, a girl sang her songs to backing tracks, though we will never know who she was. The songs were quite catchy, though. James decided to dangle his legs over the moat, which worried me just a little.

We continued our walk around the castle after about 30 minutes, crossing Gokuraku-bashi (極楽橋) on our way out. We caught the subway back to Umeda from Osaka-jō Business Park station, via Monnomiya, and Honmachi. We managed to meet up with Katherine, James’ friend from Fitzwilliam who is on her year abroad, studying Japanese. We went for dinner in a tall building with a Ferris wheel built into it on the eighth floor. I had a mushroom and salami pizza, whilst they each had a tuna doria. We chatted for about two hours, so long that the waiter brought us glasses with fresh ice for our water.

After that, we went our separate ways: James and I caught the subway to Nakamozu, about 45 minutes down the line. We had no map, so we phoned our place of stay and received some strange instructions, including walking back to the previous station! After asking a few people, and having had an old man volunteering directions, we finally found Banana House: a run-down, skank hole. It was a cross between council housing and university accommodation, with rooms available to rent for months on end. We checked in, only realising when we got to our rooms that we should have been wearing our shoes indoors, despite the step at the entrance. I suppose we should have guessed from the filthy state of the floor. We put our beds down on the tatami, James wrote postcards, and I sorted out my camera, emails, and diary, before bed.