Aside from my very last step in Japan pretty much everything is organised for me to depart this continent and return to my own at the beginning of June, but I guess that I have been enjoying myself so much that I haven't thought about the fact that in around two weeks it will all be over.
It's strange to consider that I have been away from home now for just short of four months, in honesty it feels like I have been away for a lot longer.
I realise that it's not time to start looking back at what I've achieved just yet, and I'm not one for resting on my laurels and will always want to do more, but to think about what I have been through over the last quarter of a year is pretty incredible.
It feels like almost an eternity ago that I touched down in Manila for my first night's stay in the Philippine capital, and I can't pretend that it's been an easy ride, or that everything has gone to plan along the way.
There have certainly been some difficult times, and for the first two weeks or so I felt very alone, but as time has gone along I think I have got used to being my own company, and I've tried to make sure that those thoughts are the furthest from my mind as I try to continue enjoying myself right the way to the end.
Some of the memories that I've made along the way are pretty faint right now, and often I can get caught in the immediacy of things as I am usually planning what I cam going to do with myself today, or the following day, or even next week, but I guess as I get closer to the end and I have less to think about my mind will become flooded with thoughts about what I've been through.
The period of time I have been away is certain to have a huge impact on my life, I think any amount of time doing anything for this long would, and although I've made the adjustment before when returning from Asia it's probably going to take a me a little while to get back to my regular way of life where I do have time constraints (and eventually responsibilities), but it will be nice to have to concentrate on one time-zone rather than two!
In no way am I about to start patting myself on the back for 'a job well done' just yet, and this journey is far from over as I still have a couple of cities and one more country left do visit. The clock is slowly counting down towards the end, but I'm not ready for the alarm to go off just yet....
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I feel like in the last couple of weeks that trend has subsided and that another one, not totally within my control, has begun instead.
Rain.
Yes, good old fashioned English weather seems to be trying to help prepare me for the climate that I will be very shortly returning to.
I do check the weather forecast quite often to see what it's going to be like in the city that I'm visiting or currently in as it allows me to plan activities accordingly, but it seems as though in Yokohama, Tokyo and Kyoto it has been miserable weather, but luckily I have been quite resourceful and either avoided it or tried to think of something I can do that doesn't involve me getting absolutely drenched.
Having studied the forecast on my first night here I saw that there was the potential that it was going to rain today (Monday) so thought that it was probably best to go for my hiking trip yesterday as I'd imagine it would have been pretty miserable carrying that out with the threat that it could rain at any time.
I didn't have an 'indoor' activities planned for today as such, but I figured that it'd be less terrible, and that I'd be closer to my hotel, should I need to get myself out of the terrible weather for a short, or prolonged period of time.
Going to the tourist information point at Shin-Kobe Station yesterday paid off as I managed to pick up a map for the port area of the city which is where I was planning on exploring today.
Before the earthquake in 1995, Kobe was one of the major ports in Japan, but The Great Hanshin Earthquake significantly lowered traffic heading in this direction. Shipping traffic has picked up again in recent years and the city have done everything they can to re-generate the area so I was hoping to spend some time by the water today and also visit some more of the Sannomaya area which had escaped me yesterday.
The map I grabbed was actually really good highlighting major things for me to see and I made a bit of a route and then set off around lunchtime.
The first thing I actually wanted to see was pretty close to where I am staying and I caught a glance of it yesterday when I was on my way towards Shin-Kobe Station.
As you may have noticed from my photos there are plenty of shrines in Japan generally, I think it's a bit like how you would have churches of certain Saints everywhere in the west. Each region seems to have at least one or two shrines, and if I see major ones on the map with some history attached I will at least make an attempt to visit them as I like looking around and taking in the peacefulness of the surroundings.
The Minatogawa Shrine is just down the road from my hotel and I followed some signs there and was quite surprised to discover that it it not only on the main road, but also right next to the exit for the metro station:
The front gate, as with pretty much all the shrines I've seen here, looked very imposing and walking through the grounds of the shrine it was a familiar collection of what I have seen in other places that I've been to.
What always does amaze me is the number of people that I usually find walking in and out of them who aren't tourists just looking around.
I don't really know too much about religion in Japan but it seems as though people of all types visit regularly and on my way up to the shrine itself I saw pretty much a cross-section of Japanese society paying their respects.
Another thing that I've not really considered until looking back at the photos is that, unlike churches where the grounds are outside, pretty much the whole shrine is outside and barring a little bit of cover near the main shrine itself the whole thing is open to the elements. I wonder how this is dealt with in winter, or bad weather in autumn. Each one I have been to has had immaculate grounds and I guess that it taken care of by the monks who live in the temple or by other people who maintain them.
In the search for a couple of other far less interesting buildings that I'd plotted to see along the way today I found myself in familiar territory to where I was yesterday as I came upon the Kitano-Cho area of Kobe which is the region I mentioned yesterday which had all the different buildings and houses related to different countries.
Aside from walking down the main street yesterday I didn't really get a chance to explore so I figured that as I was back there again I'd have a proper look around and I even managed to get hold of a map for the area itself which highlighted the main buildings.
Quite a lot of the things I'd seen yesterday in passing and you had to pay to get inside a lot of the traditional buildings, but I did spend some time walking up some of the side streets which I'd missed out yesterday.
Heading up a steep hill I found myself in Kitano-Cho plaza which had some interesting looking buildings there including a red brick structure which was called, The Weather Cock House:
Up some more steps next to it was the Kitano Tenman Shrine which was a more compacted version of the Minatogawa one I had seen about half an hour before, except being on a hill gave me an opportunity to look out over the city:
The Kitano-Cho area itself isn't that big although it seems to have plenty of little side streets which come off it, and I managed to navigate my way back through them and onto the main road which is close to the Sannomaya Station area.
It wasn't quite as busy with people as yesterday, there certainly weren't any queues to get into the Kobe Beef restaurants, but I did walk down one of the main shopping streets which lead to the station in order to pay a visit to the Ikuta Shrine.
I didn't come from the main gate of the shrine, but around the side of it were the places where people write out their prayers which I've now become familiar with:
The shrine building itself was quite large, and it stood out like a couple of others that I've seen because of its bright red colour:
The gate in in front of it was also bright red which I'd imagine stands out, even in a city full of lights like Kyoto:
I followed the rest of the shopping street that I had come down and eventually got to the main square of Sannomaya Station which is where I'd checked the map yesterday in order to navigate to Mount Maya.
I walked through an underground shopping area en-route to my next stop which was the city hall.
I came out at an exit near the city hall which has several buildings, and next to one of them was a giant clock made of flowers which I read had been inspired by the once deputy mayors visit to Switzerland which gave him the idea. It was put in place as a lasting memory for the Tokyo Olympic games and even in the damp weather that was starting to be developed it looked quite impressive. I imagine it would look better in the sun when the flowers have fully bloomed:
I believe each year they change the designs of the flowers in winter as I've seen some different designs in pictures around the city.
There aren't quite as many ways to get views out over the city of Kobe as there was in Tokyo for example, but one thing I did read up about was a free way to do so which was to go to the top of city hall where there is an observation tower which is open to the public throughout the day.
I wasn't exactly sure which of the city hall buildings the observation tower was in, but I saw a sign with a picture of the city view so I figured I must be in the right place as I entered.
When I went to the government building in Tokyo I wasn't expecting it to be inside of the regular office block, and here in Kobe it was exactly the same except with even less fanfare. Perhaps because of the time of day I visited I literally just had to ride up in the lift to the top floor along with lots of other people who were going about their daily business on the floors below me which was a really surreal feeling.
When I got to the top thankfully there were some more people around and there were two different views you could take, one of the bayside and the other of the hillside:
In the grim and grey weather the bayside view wasn't very spectacular, but it did give me a chance to pinpoint where a few of the other buildings were that I wasn't to visit.
On the hill side I managed to pick out where I was yesterday when I looked out over city which is strange because I think if I went back up there again I don't think I'd have any idea which one was the city hall building.
Continuing on from city hall, the weather was now starting to get pretty miserable as light rain dribbled down from the sky intermittently. I found myself walking through Higashi-Yuenchi Park which is a memorial park for the earthquake of 1995.
I imagine this would be a lovely place to come to spend a relaxing summer day, and I can imagine it is filled with people when the weather's right, but today it was mostly a corridor for people to get from one place to another.
I took my time to walk around and look at the various water features which were around the place, and I came across a statue which was the Earthquake Memorial monument which a picture showed had fallen over at the moment of the earthquake and although it was a clock, it had been left at the same exact time that the disaster had struck in the city as a permanent reminder of what happened:
Walking through the rest of the park I was almost now at the water's edge and I crossed over a couple of very busy roads to walk into a small portion of the harbour where I got a sight of the area which is known as 'Harbourland':
Following the path along I came across a large fish-shaped statue which was next to a restaurant and cafe at the front of what is known as Meriken Park:
The most notable thing about this area, apart from the excellent view out over the sea was that there was another memorial spot which described how the city and the port in particular had attempted to rebuild itself since the earthquake:
I read all the information that was there was to read and then headed over to the far corner of the area where you could get a great view out towards the airport:
To the right there was a large hotel which was shaped like a boat....
.....and just behind me were the Maritime Museum and the Kobe Port Tower:
The Maritime museum looked closed, but it had a couple of its exhibits on show out at the front:
The building itself was interesting looking and it made me wonder why they chose such a unique design.
The Port Tower is another place where you can get excellent views out over the whole area. Obviously it wasn't the best day to see Kobe from above, and as I'd already been up to the city hall to see everything from there I spent most of my time trying to fit as much of the whole thing as I possible could in a photograph...
I walked along a path which took you across the water to a few docks where tourist boats take you on trips around the nearby area:
Following this I made my way across to an area which had a small shopping centre and some interesting shops in, and then at the back there was a Ferris wheel:
It wasn't huge like the one in Taiwan though, and I figure that the view from the top probably wasn't that fantastic. It's strange because on the pictures I'd seen it looked a lot bigger.
Just as I was walking back towards my final stop for the day a ferry was about to set off, it looked pretty swish, but I have no idea where it was headed off to. Looked a lot bigger than some of the smaller tourist boats I'd seen earlier:
The rain was starting come down a little bit heavier now, but on my return to the hotel, I traveled back on myself a little bit. Thankfully I was able to take some cover underneath the flyover that covered part of the street that I was walking on. Eventually it ended though and I had to walk back out in the open where it seemed the rain had become a bit heavier.
Thankfully the last thing I was looking for, which was Chinatown appeared on my left hand side and I had a brief walk through what looked to be a fairly quiet area at that moment:
I'm always amazed by Chinatown, it seems as though there are shops and restaurants coming out from every different direction, and as it wasn't very busy it gave me a better chance to look at what they were selling and serving.
I made it from one end to the other and then thankfully found an undercover shopping arcade which took me from Motomachi Station pretty much all the way back to Kobe Station where I grabbed some dinner and then returned to my room as it was getting dark.
It had been an enjoyable day and thankfully the weather hadn't spoiled it too much, although I did feel a bit damp and in need of warming up when I got back to my room.
It ended up feeling like one of those days where I was on a massive sightseeing tour as I'm sure from my blog it seems like I went from one place to another, and then on to the next, but I did walk around at or in each one and spend some time there - there just isn't that much to describe other than what I have written.
Like my stay in Kyoto, my three days in Kobe have flown by and I feel like if there's any city that I've done the most walking in, it's been here.
It's been nice though, and I can see why it is often described as under-appreciated as I imagine that most people probably visit here for the day from Osaka and Kyoto, but don't really stay and get to appreciate the city properly.
Hopefully I've managed to achieve that in my time here.
Here Comes the Rain Again
Eurythmics (1983)
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