After emerging from the world
under the streets of the Sannomiya area, we tried to find our way to this
ropeway thing that Sawyer told us about earlier. It is like a gondola (the one that goes up a
mountain, not the one that goes in water; I first assumed the latter for some
reason, but I was wrong) that takes you up to the top of Mount Rokko and gives a
really cool view of the city. We, once
again, had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get up there. We couldn’t figure out which train to take,
or which bus to take, or how to communicate with the taxi driver on how to get
to the ropeway. On a side note, I
learned a few phrases in Japanese like “good morning,” “good afternoon,” “good
evening,” “thank you,” “excuse me,” “are you well?,” “yes, I am well,” and a
few others. Every once in a while I
would say something, and I think some of the people thought I was actually
Japanese because they would start talking to me extensively in Japanese. Since I
couldn’t understand a single word, I probably looked dumb standing there
with a puzzled look on my face. This
happened with the taxi driver; I asked him “how much?” in Japanese, and then he
said something back to me in Japanese. When
he found out I didn’t know what he was saying, he got frustrated trying to
explain and wouldn’t let us in his cab.
That’s another thing, when the Japanese people were telling us “no” for
whatever reason they would almost always cross their fingers or their arms into
an “X” and say “no, no, no, no.” Anyway,
we were all pretty frustrated trying to get to this dang ropeway, so we decided
to just go back to the hotel and regroup later for dinner. When we got back to the station near our
hotel and were walking to the hotel, Kyle randomly wanted to go down these
stairs to try to walk under the street.
We walked down the stairs and down a hallway to another underground
world. The hallway opened up to an array
of shops and restaurants up and down another hallway. We walked around a little bit before we tried
another staircase to surface from. We
emerged a little ways away from where we descended. After we went back to the hotel, I wanted to
explore the underground system near our hotel, so Jillian and I were on our way
to the elevator to go back down when we ran into Sawyer who said that the
elevator will go all the way down to the underground part. We took the elevator all the way to the
bottom, and were surprised to find where we ended up. We weren’t far from where we went back up the
stairs earlier. The best part was we
found a completely different underground system that was connected to the first
one we found by the area that led to our hotel.
We walked a little bit down this new system and found a 100 Yen store
(which is pretty much the equivalent of a dollar store in the USA). We didn’t get to spend much time down in this
system, but I wish we did because it looked like it extended a good distance.
Jillian and I then met up with
Kyle and Sawyer and took the underground (our new favorite thing to use) toward
Harborland (I think that’s what it was called)
which would take us close to Kobe Tower.
Just like Tokyo Tower looked like a red version of the Eiffel Tower,
Kobe Tower looked like a red version of the Space Needle in Seattle. It was really pretty at night though. There was also a museum near the tower that
had this cool net-like architecture that was lit up too. We went to the tower so we could go up to the
observation deck which should have been open, but for some reason they closed
it down for the night which was pretty disappointing. We then walked over to this building called
“Mosaic” which had a bunch of restaurants and shops, but the first thing we ran
into there was an arcade. It was like
Dave and Busters where there are just a ton of arcade games everywhere. There were also a bunch of things like
crane-games with different themes for the items that were inside. We also came across a room filled with photo
booths which Jillian had done earlier and said that they were extremely fun but
I’ll get to that in a bit. We went to
dinner and ate this thing that was like an egg that was like a crepe and was
filled with rice, topped with meat and a sauce.
As weird as it looked it was actually really good!
We then went back to the photo booth room. The room was filled with about 15 different
kinds of photo booths each with their own theme; some were girly, some were
punk, some were chic, and some were slightly odd. We picked one that had a Tokyo theme to it.
We slipped under the unusually thick and heavy curtain that was hanging
across the entrance way into the booth.
The booth was quite a bit different than the booths back in the States;
there was no bench to sit on, but rather there was a large area to stand with a
green screen on the back wall and shelves on each side of the large screen
displaying pictures and the camera waiting to capture our beauty for us to
store our belongings. Since Jillian had
already done one of these earlier in the week we didn’t have to spend much time
trying to figure out how to work the machine (even though it probably wouldn’t
have been too difficult… I think). The
screen started to change images as it showed us a sample pose to do for the
first picture. The image was two Asian girls
standing and smiling; once the camera had taken the picture of our lovely faces
the image changed into the same two girls doing a new pose. The next poses consisted of the typical peace
sign pose, the two girls forming a heart (each forming a half), two girls
putting their hands together in what, to me, looked like girls high-fiving
while awkwardly putting our heads together and looking in the direction of our
hands, a Charlie’s angels pose, and a hand cupping the face while winking. Yeah they were interesting poses, but it was
nice to have some ideas since, as many of you know, I am not very creative or
decisive with my poses for pictures (rather
they usually end up with me just making a freakishly weird face). In the beginning Jillian and I were just
taking pictures by ourselves because Kyle and Sawyer decided not to join, but
as I suspected after a few pictures were taken, both of them ended up coming in
and joining the fun.
After all the pictures were taken, we went out of the
booth to the side where there was another screen. This screen was a touch screen used to
decorate and customize your photo strip.
Each person could pick their own backgrounds and themes and then you
could decorate each photo with stamps and letters and whatever you want. It was kind of difficult figuring out how to
decorate the pictures and how to undo what you did if you didn’t like it
because everything was in Japanese. The
weirdest thing about these photos is that somehow our eyes got bigger and our
skin looked flawless; this led to some pictures making us look extremely good
looking and others making us look like we have some crazy eyes, but overall it
was a blast!
After all the fun and excitement, we decided to grab a
snack at the local family mart. The
family mart has become somewhat of a safe haven for us in Japan; it is just a
little convenience store like a 7Eleven (without the slurpees though) where we
go to get snacks and drinks. Tonight,
however, we ventured to try the Japanese drink that caters to both the adult
and the kid in me… juice box sake. I
have to say it wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds, but it definitely wasn’t
something that I would sip on for my own enjoyment. Even though that was a bust (as we kind of
assumed it would be) I got to eat one of my favorite treats… mochi. If you don’t know what mochi is, it is a
gummy, chewy texture made out of rice, and even though it sounds weird (and I
can just imagine some of the faces being made after reading that last statement),
it tastes like a marshmallow. What I had
was that texture enclosing some ice cream.
I don’t know if it was just the fact that I ate mochi in Japan, but it
was delicious! It definitely made up for
the nasty sake. We spent the rest of the
night just talking and eating ice cream and having a grand old time.
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