Sake and sardines

It turns out we arrived in Japan right in the middle of public holiday season: three out of four weekends have been long weekends. This has given us a lot of time to explore our local region, Kobe.

On one particular long weekend we journeyed to a sake museum. For those readers who don't know, sake is an alcoholic drink made from fermented rice. When done poorly, sake tastes like what methylated spirits smells like; when done well, it tastes really quite nice. After a very informative English video on the ins and outs of making sake (on which I am now "full bottle") and touring the relics of traditional sake making materials, I almost drank a full bottle of sake! To sell their wares, the museum gives samples to their visitors and I think they got a little excited to have foreign guests, as they got us to try just about every available sake drink they had on offer. However, in retrospect, perhaps this was just a clever ploy to get visitors to buy more products, the logic being the more tipsy they are the more likely they are to buy. Indeed, it worked--as Matt and I are now the proud owners of some sweet plum sake! Check out the pictures below as it really was a delightful place; cameras, unfortunately, are yet to capture smell, but take it from me, the subtle smell of aged cedar mixed with the dim shadows that pervaded the place really transported us back to a different world. (Where men were men, and real men got naked in giant vats of steaming rice.)












Then it was off for sardines; however, not the eating kind. Kobe is a port city, and typical of port cities it has a highly concentrated population with the employment that international trade brings. However, this is compounded by the fact that Kobe is wedged between a mountain range and the ocean. This is where the sardines enter the picture. We traveled up Mt Rokko, the highest mountain in the region, and from here we got our first birds-eye-view of Kobe's geography. (And I mean literally--on the floor of the museum at the top of the mountain there is a giant satellite image of Kobe and the Rokko Mountains.) As you can see from the pictures below, possibly the best way to describe how the city appears from such a height is by comparison to sardines squished into a tiny tin. It is a truly foreign way of living to the eyes of Perthites used to flat landscapes and hectares of backyard. It's a magnificent sight and especially great when viewed from the top of a mountain where the air temperature is 6 degrees lower than the sauna we've been enduring at sea-level.