{"id":8290,"date":"2015-11-03T05:05:45","date_gmt":"2015-11-03T13:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/?p=8290"},"modified":"2015-11-03T05:21:23","modified_gmt":"2015-11-03T13:21:23","slug":"japan-2015-day-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.i8u.org\/blog\/?p=8290","title":{"rendered":"Japan 2015 Day 7"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did I just pay $155 for a steak dinner?<\/p>\n

I started out the day in Fukuyama and I slept about as well as I thought I would. The shinkansen trains started before 6AM and they woke me up a couple of times. The hotel full of doctors was about as quiet as you\u2019d expect, so that wasn\u2019t a problem.<\/p>\n

Breakfast was even fancier than I\u2019d expected. As soon as I sat down they asked if I wanted a custom-made omelet (of course I did) and they even had French toast. Here\u2019s what I picked out, though.<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/p>\n

Quite worth the whatever-the-heck I said yesterday. Oh, and I did end up hitting the bar. It was a little weird and brightly lit, and they kept wanting to mix different cocktails, but it was fine.<\/p>\n

I got on the train for Kobe and went looking for my hotel. Of course I kept running into Chinese tourists who were either blocking my way to the trains (and I missed one because of them) or generally just getting in my way. All the way from Shin-Kobe station, off the subway to Sannomiya, and my hotel ended up being next to Chinatown! That\u2019s some planning on my part.<\/p>\n

I ended up doing the whole wandering around thing like I usually do. I went up to the old foreigner\u2019s residences but didn\u2019t go into any of the buildings. I was thinking, \u201cWho cares about a bunch of fake-European houses from the early 20th century where the round-eyes used to live?\u201d I did make it to the tippy-top where there was a shrine.<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/p>\n

Oddly enough there was a classical choral concert going on as well.The view was pretty great.<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/p>\n

After some more hilly walks I made it back to Shin-Kobe station (where I arrived earlier in the morning) where the \u201cTakenaka Carpentry Tools Museum\u201d is located. They have recorded explanations in several different languages that they\u2019ll lend you. It started out slow talking about stone vs metal axes in the oooolden days and moved onto talking about the carpentry of temples. I was pretty fascinated and spent a couple of hours there (I have a thing for temples and shrines after all) but I never did make it through all the recordings. The woman at the front desk laughed when I mentioned that. There was a live demonstration of Japanese hand planes (pull planes), with two foreign examples (push planes), and a Japanese spear plane! And after the demo you could try them all yourself!<\/p>\n