Day 5: Picking up Sarah and exploring Kobe

To continues yesterday's post, we arrived at our home in the Gion district of Kyoto at about midnight last night after visiting the Mission home in Kobe. Thank goodness for our taxi driver who helped us find this home down the dark and mysterious side streets and alleys of Japan! Addresses here are kind of random - homes are assigned to neighborhoods and then streets and then maybe a house number! We have a two story home with beautiful new tatami floors, rice paper windows and wood floors in the upstairs and kitchen areas. Unfortunately, we couldn't quite figure out the remotes to operate the heat and I didn't want to bother our host at 1:00 am, so Bruce and I wore all our clothes and snuggled under the covers to keep warm last night! Trevor an Katie were lucky enough to have their heater work and stayed toasty. 

Today is the big day we pick up Sarah. We are so excited! We took the train back to Kobe and a bus that had no English to the mission home. Luckily, we remembered the land marks near the mission home and were able to get off at the right stop. We walked over to the mission office and picked up Sarah and headed off to explore Kobe.  

First stop - Kobe Port Tower! Sarah had been wanting to visit this tower and now finally had a chance to do it. It is located down on the waterfront we had great views of the city, mountains, and bay.

We were very hungry and had no idea where to eat. We decided to stop and ask someone if they know a good place to eat. Thank goodness for Sarah's ability to speak Japanese! She chatted with a woman and her mother on the sidewalk and asked them for a good noodle shop. She and her mother were so kind as to walk through the streets of Kobe and led us to this amazing noodle shop famous for its Kobe style of soba.  The restaurant did not even have a name or even any pictures of food in the window!  The gentlemen who owns the restaurant has been here for over 20 years and was very kind. We enjoyed a wonderful meal! Pork, soba noodles, onions, and lots of toppings with shumaji on the side - a type of gyoza.  

After dinner we walked back toward the train station and found Kobe's Chinatown! They were already getting ready for their big New Year's celebration in a few weeks.

We are now officially 5 Gaijin traveling together - it has been a wonderful day!  We love having Sarah with us again and it was fun watching her talk to everyone and to see how impressed they are with her Japanese! I was amazed at how genuinely interested people were to talk to Sarah and how excited they were to find a gaijin who could speak nihongo!