Monday, 14 April 2008
After the previous day’s long haul Madam’s detailed research paid off big time with a leisurely morning, a midday checkout time and no appointments until the evening.
I kept plugging away at the email mountain, a slow process since most of it was only accessible through Telstra web-mail, which is hardly the speediest of conveyances.
From the 28th floor of the hotel, which is located on the western edge of downtown Kobe, we had a view away across the long narrow city wedged between mountains to the west and the Inland Sea.
Once the preliminaries had been completed and the suitcase packed, it was time for a brief review of the options for the next hour or two. Basically this amounted to a choice between going straight to lunch at the German bakery or working up an appetite by taking a stroll around the interesting houses in an area just beside the hotel (but on the southern side, our outlook was to the north) which was, however, a bit hilly.
Bearing the jobs that needed to be carried out later on in the day (chiefly laundry and other chores, but they had to be done) in mind, I thought that walking up hill and down dale would take up time that could be more profitably spent getting these other activities out of the way, so my preference was for an early lunch.
Once we’d left the hotel and surveyed the adjacent topography I was sure I’d pulled the right rein since the slopes leading to the interesting houses, while not quite vertical were, at the same time, not all that far off it.
The German bakery (Freundlieb) is located in a converted church on a quiet back street a short walk away from the hotel. There is a downstairs retail section, which we walked straight past, and a stylish cafe on the first floor where we ordered the Monday sandwich special for ‘Er Indoors (soup, salmon and vegetable sandwich, drink and ice cream for 1080-yen) and a roast beef sandwich (1600-yen) for me. If I’d been on the ball I could have ordered a half bottle of Valpolicella to go with it, but the sun wasn’t quite over the yard arm so I opted for a cappuccino instead.
Both meals were substantial enough for a satisfying brunch though Madam claimed she was having difficulty tasting the salmon in hers.
With brunch out of the way we rolled back to the hotel, collected the luggage from the cloak room and boarded the subway, Myodani-bound. A quick taxi transfer took us to The mother’s place, where a quick report on our activities over the previous week was followed by a rearrangement of luggage for the next couple of days (Kobe > Kyoto > Nara > Kobe).
Having arrived at Kansai Airport with two large suitcases, we’d transferred to one (mine) for the Kobe > Kanazawa > Takayama > Nagoya > Hakone > Kitakami > Kobe leg we’d just completed but, figuring we only needed a couple of changes of clothes for the next three days we packed what we thought we’d need into a smaller overnight bag and headed back downtown to the night’s hotel.
The casual observer might be puzzled by these frequent re-locations, particularly when we were staying in Kobe.
So, initially, was I.
Once on the ground, however, things made a bit more sense.
The first night in Kobe had been somewhere to crash after the flight, a place with a good view, an easy transfer from the airport shuttle to the hotel, and, most importantly, a substantial smorgasbord breakfast. Most of those factors were irrelevant for the rest of the stay, and the location on the edge of the harbour was a little out of the way.