Kindness and Cockups. Kobe and candy.

Phew what a week. Shigoto, shigoto, shigoto (work, work, work). Sadly our beam time has not thrown up any concrete information so it seems I spent almost 60 hours awake for nothing. Ah well it was our first time so I wasn’t particularly hopeful. I have to say I’m so glad I was into Lego and Mechano as a child as I seem to have spent a good portion of the last week with an Alan key in hand. As Liam pointed out to me experimental hutches are like giant Mechano sets.

Anyway other than that this week hasn't been massively interesting. Besides work I got my alien residency card, which has opened the door to some cool things, namely I could now get a keitei (mobile phone). I have also got my hand on a nice road bike for…FREE. Unbelievable right.

So that brings me on to the title of the blog. Kindness. The level of generosity and patience I’ve experienced from people here has been unbelievable. After mentioning I needed a bike Ignace, the French guy I mentioned earlier, sent me a template message to send out to inquire about a second hand bike. I got a response nearly straight away, and all though I insisted on paying, the kind person offering the bike to me would have none of it. Sugoi (amazing).

This also brings me back onto my first cock-up, so it turns out that mailing list I used to send out the message shouldn’t be used in this way. I got a short sharp telling off. Still we don’t learn unless we make mistakes and I always resolve to only make them once.

So the next kindness, you can see a theme emerging here ey. The money I had brought with me finally ran out on Tuesday and due to an error processing my bank account I had no bankcard with which to process my wages. Bit of an issue since I’d hoped to go away on Friday with the free day holiday. Fortunately for me the secretarial staff where amazing and managed to get me my flight reimbursement money in cash. I do believe I owe them some cake.

Speaking of cake I thought I’d take a brief moment to talk about sweets. Someone the other day asked me what the sweets were like in Japan and I sadly couldn’t tell them. As I may have mentioned before I’m a bit funny with food and I have a horrible feeling I’ve lost some weight since I’ve been here. So I decided to investigate Japanese sweets further. Traditional Japanese sweets are called Wagashi and here are a few I’ve come across so far.

Mochi: Essentially a ball of glutinous rice flour covered in sugar and usually stuffed with something sweet. Most of the time this is Anko, or sweet red bean paste. Whilst not overly sweet these things have an amazing gooey texture and I can’t get enough of em.

Dango: Similar to mochi but stickier and on, well, a stick. Kind of like a sweet kebab.

Yokan: These are blocks of agar mixed with Anko and sugar. It’s similar to jelly but not quite so rubbery. Very tasty.

Taiyaki: This is again filled with anko. It’s essentially fried pancake like batter pressed around anko in the shape of a fish. I think they do other filling as well. You seem to be able to get them in many street markets.

There are also many cookies, including these nice black sesame seed ones I picked up yesterday. Fruit jellies and hard sweets to, I’m a big fan of the raw cane sugar things. And of course many odd flavors of chupa chup, including matcha (green tea) flavor.

Ok so yesterday. Now this was a fun day. I’d been emailing back and forth with a member of Osaka’s Frisbee team called Yuko for a while and had found out she was also into climbing. Yuko is a lot of fun. She’s very lively, I think that may be down to her job as a personal trainer, and is also very curious about England. She had told me she new of a nice place to climb in Kobe so we agreed to meet up on Friday as it was a national holiday.




On my way to the bus stop I noticed there was a festival going on just own the road from my flat. Had to go have a look around really. I’m not sure exactly what the occasion was, possibly just because it was Showa day, but it was pretty fun. There were loads of food stores, people selling locally grown goods and also some displays from the local school kids. The music and dancing was a lot of fun to watch.

I stayed for a bit but I was getting on for time and didn’t want to keep Yuko waiting. I set off on the now familiar trip to the station and took the train to Kobe. Unlike Osaka, Kobe station was a lot smaller and I easily found Yuko. We wandered for about ten minutes to the rock gym, introducing ourselves a bit more along the way.

The gym, called Kobe rock garden, was pretty small but lots of fun. It was all bouldering but that's not a problem, it was a god way to get back into climbing. I was a little confused at first. The grading system and how the routes were planned where very different to hat I’m used to. Also the starting footholds weren’t so great, but I eventually got the hang of the place (no pun intended).

Ah it was fun to be climbing again and it was nice to do it with many other enthusiasts. Although they didn’t speak much English the staff were very helpful and I think explaining climbing moves transcends language. Yuko got chatting to a couple there that were about our level and we all tried problems together. It was fun and there was much cheering whenever one of us reached the top hold.

After a good two and a half ours of bouldering I was getting pretty hungry. We got changed and Yuko led me down to the main shopping area of Kobe on the port. It seems really nice don there, much less busy than Osaka and actually reminded me of home a bit. I think I’ll have to look around Kobe again when I’m not so rushed, there seems to be quite a bit to do.
So onto the food. Yuko picked out a hamburger restaurant with a great view of the river. Hamburgers aren’t normally my thing, I’m not so good with beef, but it seemed impolite to disagree with my host so I just went with it. Now in Japan hamburgers are done a bit differently. As you can see from the picture they’re generally served like a stew with a thick onion gravy. It was good but a bit heavy and I think it sat on my stomach a little ☹.

Right so well fed we had a good chat about loads of things, mainly travelling and Frisbee though. Lots of talk about Frisbee in fact. Yuko told me all about a tournament coming up in July which should be cool. Apparently in Japan, and contrary to what I’d been told, things are the same as Britain. There is a real struggle to get women playing the sport. Yuko it seems really wants to expand the team in Osaka so they can enter more tournaments around Japan. I’ll have to help with that I think .

We left the restaurant and had a quick wander around the nearby shopping mall. I had asked her earlier about getting hold of a phone and noticed some signs up in one of the shops we passed. In we went and after a few initial exchanges we realized the salesperson spoke perfect English. I managed to get myself a good deal on a 2-year contract, half price with the 2-year contract, so I’m sorted phone-wise. Or rather I would be but my train was actually due to leave before the phone would be registered eep.

I had planned o meet up with Yuko again on Sunday anyway so she offered to pick up my phone whilst I legged it to the train station. Now I realize that this was a bit of a silly thing to do given I’d only met this person once, but my experiences so far have only been positive, plus as I’ve sad before Frisbee players are generally all right. So off I dashed.

Alas it was for nothing I missed the last bus home and had to get a taxi, which was outrageously expensive. Cock-up. It probably would have just been cheaper to stay in Kobe. Ah well never mind. Anyway I’ll finish there. Currently there is an open day going on at work but that's for another post. I’ll leave you all with a few pictures of my home cooking, including something I have dubbed okonomibreakfast, okonomiyaki batter mixed with fruit.

Dewa matta mina-san.