Kobe, Day 2

Monday, November 14, 2011
Kobe, Kinki, Japan
Today was the first official day of the conference and the amount of participants almost doubled. The talks were pretty interesting, the speakers were from all over the world (mostly from Canada and US, however).
I met up with Maran for lunch and we had some pasta and Japanese-style pizza . Maran is documenting the food we had, so I might be able to post it here later :)
After lunch we wondered around the underground shopping complex for a bit and stumbled upon an amazing souvenir shop. It was full of all kinds of cute, pretty and silly objects, both useless and useful, ranging in price from a few dollars to a few thousands. Everything was of extremely high quality and it made the choice of souvenirs very hard!
After the conference there was a banquet which me and Maran could attend. The venue was pretty interesting: a place called Kobe Kachoen, a giant greenhouse filled with tropical plants, flowers and various birds. Unfortunately most birds were asleep so late in the evening, but we saw some slightly dazed owls of different sizes, ducks and even penguins! I approached the penguins corralled behind a low fence and one of them waddled closer with a look of mild interest. I offered it my hand with the intention of poking the thing, but it had a different idea about human hands and nibbled on it a little. When the hand turned out to be inedible to the penguin, it turned around to walk away, so I managed to poke its stubby tail.
The food at the banquet was rather underwhelming. Most of it was fairly western, the dessert was missing and, most importantly, the world famous Kobe beef was nowhere to be found... The only good thing about the banquet (apart from the birds) was that we were able to keep masu, the traditional Japanese sake cups. We also got a small souvenir after exiting the banquet venue. On the way out we saw some giant leafs of Victoria amazonica.

Comments

juliettka
2011-11-17

wAndered :P

juliettka
2011-11-17

This is so cool - a penguin tried to eat you! :)))

Did you get me a souvenir? ;-P

juliettka
2011-11-17

Did you drink sake??

Lee
2011-12-26

Please tell us the NAME and location of that wonderful souvenir shop!!

2025-02-17

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