Day 10 - Nommins

We decided to have a bit of a lie-in today, after early starts the past few days. At 11 we walked down to the station and got on a train to Osaka, on a most important mission. After getting a bit confused and standing spinning a map around for 10 minutes, a woman came and helped us find our way. After a short, and surprisingly well signposted, walk we arrived at our destination: the POKEMON CENTRE!!

Yes, this was Sarah's idea.

Helen's estimate of an hour's time looking round was a little on the low side and, despite the shop being relatively small, it was almost 2 hours before Sarah appeared with bags of poke-goodness. By this stage we were both quite hungry, but decided that we would go to Starbucks for a drink before making up our minds about what to have for lunch. Turns out this was also a mistake because neither of us knew where we were going and ended up in a department store, with yet another unhelpful map, having no idea what to do. Deciding to be brave, we chose a Japanese restaurant and tried some new and exotic foods.

Ok, so we got an English menu, but it was still a bit of an adventure with food like miso soup and 'cream croquettes' to try. All in all it was a very good meal, and we did eventually find the Starbucks so sat and had vanilla frappuccinos for dessert.

Next we got the train to Kobe. We wandered through the streets of Kobe, looking through a covered market and some of the city's many bakeries. We somehow ended up in chinatown, which was very cool with statues and a shop selling a selection of different sized pandas, but was unfortunately in completely the opposite direction from where we had been trying to go. Having managed to walk to the next train station, we got on the train back to where we started and got the subway instead.

Our real plan for Kobe was to eat the world famous Kobe beef that is produced in the area. We had a recommendation for a very good restaurant, but it was quite upmarket so we thought we should try to dress up a bit. This amounted us wearing trousers instead of shorts, but when we got to the restaurant the staff didn't seem to mind.

We ordered our steaks (about £50 each) and very soon our clothing worries were forgotten. After a very tasty smoked salmon starter, and some slightly bizzare soup, the chef started to cook the beautifully marbled beef in front of us. Sliced into bite-size pieces, we picked up our first taste of the beef with chopsticks and started to eat. It really was as good as we had been told, possibly even better. In fact, we may currently be trying to work out how we can live here permanently so that we can eat it more often.

Having tried to finish as much of the delicious food as possible, we were pretty stuffed, and so walked very slowly back to the station to catch our shinkansen home. The journey was pretty uneventful, apart for running into every single person who had been eating in the beef restaurant, and walking past two men carrying a very tall tree onto the Kyoto subway.

Tomorrow we return to Osaka for the Tenjin Matsuri, one of the biggest festivals in Japan.