Kobe!

We had the chance to meet up with Drew's cousin, Kristen, in Kobe the very last weekend in January.  She has a job right now with "Semester at Sea;" it's a semester abroad on a ship that heads west from San Diego and ends up in England a few months later, stopping at major ports along the way for culturally enriching and educational opportunities.  It was about a 4 hour drive to where her ship was docked, so we listened to Phantom of the Opera, Spamalot, and Man of La Mancha on the way up to pass the time.  

 Once we got there and found Kristen (we had to ask a Japanese man for directions to the port terminal; luckily he had very clear gestures, and we were able to recognize the word "yuu taahn") we set out to reward our children for being so good on the drive.  First up was the Ferris Wheel.  

Vivi wanted to pose with the Anpanman statue until I took out my camera.  Then she sulked away.  

 We only got to go around once, but it gave us a nice view of the city, and Vivi thought it was magical.  

 Looking at Kobe made me a little sad that we're on a Marine base instead of a Navy one.  There's something exciting about a seeing all the ships in port!  

 After our ride we headed to the Anpanman museum.  Anpanman is like Japanese Sesame Street.  All Japanese children know Anpanman.  I guess it was originally a series of children's books that was made into a TV show.  Lots of the characters are based on food.  From Wikipedia-"Many times during the Second World War, Yanase (the creator) became faced with the prospect of starvation, which made him dream about eating anpan (a bean-jam filled pastry). This inspired the creation of the Anpanman character ... In each episode, Anpanman fights with Baikinman ("bacteria man") and helps the people of the town. He always goes on patrol in the area around the house of Uncle Jam. He is a symbol of justice, fighting for the cause of justice every day"

I'm sure the museum would have been very informative if we knew more Japanese. There were dioramas of Anpanman's greatest battles and life history all over the place.

 The museum was also half play-place.  Lots of things to climb on and in and through.  

Here's Vivi being a plate of plastic food in the window of a restaurant.

Kristen was very nice to spend one of her evenings in a foreign country doing little kid things!

 The funnest part of the museum was this sloped room with bouncy balls of all the characters' faces.  The balls were really soft, and one of the museum attendants kept throwing the balls to the top of the room so the kids could run wildly through them as they bounced and rolled their way back to the bottom.  

 When we'd had our fill of Anpanman et. al, we decided to go in search of some of the fabled Kobe beef.  On our way through the streets we passed this store that made me want to play 7 Wonders.

 We went to a restaurant called "Steakland" on a recommendation from some friends.  It was freakishly good.  The chef came out and masterfully cooked all the food on the grill in front of us.  The first course was some seafood--shrimp, scallions, and octopus (which Vivi really liked). Then we had some grilled vegetables (super tasty zucchini and mushrooms, and also konnyaku, which is a "yam cake" that looks like a slimy, rubbery rock) and a bowl of brothy soup.  Drew surprised himself by liking the mushrooms.  Then we were served our steaks with garlic chips and grilled bean sprouts on the side.  The steaks were so tender they almost didn't seem like meat anymore.  Rafe was a huge fan.  I was forced to share much more of my steak with him than I wanted to . . .

 After all the delicious food had been consumed, they brought us out some ice cream (black currant for the girls, grapefruit for the boys).  Our waitress was Vietnamese and told us how beautiful our children were.  She said she hoped Rafe would marry an Asian girl so they would have beautiful mixed children.  She also told us she was a little disappointed her boyfriend is Japanese, because she would really like to have half Asian babies.  I assured her that it's far better to have a good husband that you love than it is to have beautiful children.  Though, I guess I can't really speak from experience, since I have the beeeeeeeest of both worlds!

We dropped Kristen off at her ship and then checked into our hotel.  We did not get a baby bed for Rafe the first night, cause sometimes we assume that he'll go to sleep when he's tired (HA!).  He played with the radio and climbed onto and off of the beds and had to be extricated from beneath the bathroom sink every 5 minutes until about 11:30 when I was finally able to fence him into a corner with my body in an L shape and he went to sleep.  

The next morning we decided to walk to the Kobe Animal Kingdom.  We walked through the Conference Center on Port Island's big square and admired the fountain/sculpture before eating breakfast at a cafe on the perimeter.  

The Animal Kingdom is a series of enormous green houses.  It was like a botanical garden/petting zoo of exotic animals.  The first section we came to had all the fluffy things.  

 Vivi jumped right in.  The rabbits were very friendly.  There were so many of them hopping around it was kind of hard not to step on them!  

 Rafe was afraid of them at first.  

 But with Daddy's encouragement he was finally able to pet them without crying.  

 Squeaky guinea pigs.  

 The next area was a water lily garden.  They did their bird show (that we attended at the very end) in this room and had all the spectators sit along the water's edge while the birds flew over the water.  

 There were tons of little fish swimming around under all the different lilies.  We bought some fish food to distract the kids from trying to get in the water themselves, but it was in pellet form, so every time the kids threw some food in, a mighty fish battle commenced until the pellet got picked down to nothing.  

 The perimeter of this room was lined with lots of different colors of bougainvillea.

 There were some white ones, but they weren't as vibrant as these.  Go iPhone camera!

 In the next room there was a parliament of owls on display (they got to fly in the bird show).

 And we spent some time smelling the flowers with our noses (instead of picking them with our fingers . . .)

 I want to say these are bleeding hearts, but I am not sure.  

More beautiful hanging flowers.  It was paradisaical.  

 The next section was not a green house, but had a net over it.  There was an island in the middle with a conspiracy of leaping lemurs on it.  They were sunning themselves on the sandy banks.  

In the moat surrounding the island were various species of ducks, cranes, pelicans, flamingos and ibis.  

 Also koi.  I easily fooled them into thinking I was feeding them, but I will admit to having the heebie jeebies when they started sucking on my finger.  Their lips are weird.  

 We got up-close and personal with lots of the birds.  

 My favorite were these huge pinkish pelicans with stocky legs.  I'm sure they weigh more than Vivi.  

 In the next greenhouse they had a capybara petting zoo!  Vivi was distrustful of them and their weird feet.  

 She seemed ok with the mara . . .

  . . . but if a capybara got too close she squealed uncomfortably and dodged.  

 We got her some leaves so she could feed the beasts.  

 She warmed up to them, but Rafe made sure to keep his daddy's legs between himself and the ROUS's.  

 After the capybaras they had a beaver enclosure.  It was fun to see beavers up close!  

 They both grabbed huge mouthfulls of grass and went to work on it while their keeper threw a bunch of sticks in the water for them to retrieve and add to their dam.  

 The next room had a lot of exciting birds.  I can't remember what these are called.  

 But I do know that this is a toucan!

And this hornbill yelled at us for awhile.  They have loud croaky voices that gave Vivi pause.  

 On the ground in the exotic birds room was a mob of lazy kangaroos.  This one had a joey in her pouch, but I kind of think she put the baby in wrong . . .

 After the kangaroos was a creep of giant tortoises.  We had to keep Rafe from climbing on them like playground equipment, though I think the inclination was perfectly understandable.  

 We let Vivi feed one some vegetables.  I was surprised by their thick, pink tongues!  

After the food was gone, this one made a beeline for Rafe hoping for more goodies.  He promptly cried and fled.  

 In the very back were a waddle of penguins, more owls, 2 llamas, and one bald eagle who looked a little disgruntled about not having more space.  We felt sorry for him and thought patriotic thoughts.  

After the bird show we ate lunch.  They had this super cute llama themed curry dish, but the kids wanted "American Dogs" (corn dogs). 

Alpacurry!

After the Animal Kingdom, we went back to the hotel to let Rafe take a nap, since he'd hardly slept at all.  He did not sleep, but I sure did.  Pregnancy is hard.  After I sheepishly awoke, we went for a hike to see a pretty waterfall.  

 We got there right before it started to get dark.  On our way back, Drew spotted a trio of wild boar in a clearing!  I was too excited to point them out to the children and scared them away with my enthusiastic wow-ing, but it was a thrilling end to the hike nevertheless.  

That night we explored Kobe's China town.  

 Their main square was flanked by all the Zodiac animals, so we took pictures with our respective creatures.  Vivi is a Rabbit.

 Rafe is a Snake.

 I'm the awesomest one.  

 And Drew is an ox.  

"hard-working, modest, industrious, loyal, philosophical, patient, good-hearted and morally upright"

We picked a restaurant to eat at, and as we walked up the lady standing outside said "no English menu."  And I said, "no problem!"  With my basic reading skills and Google translate we made it work.  

I told Drew to make his best Chinese face. 

That night I paid for a crib and we all slept much better.  In the morning we checked out of the lovely hotel (they were having a Bridal Expo of sorts so there were lots of mannequins in floofy dresses in the halls).  

 And then we went to church.  We went to a Japanese ward, but there were quite a few English speaking members in the congregation.  They used to have their own English branch, but they just didn't have enough people to keep it going, so they all meet together now.  One of the missionaries sits in the back row and translates the meeting into a microphone connected to his iPhone, then all the people who need the English sign into an app that lets them just plug in their earphones wherever they're sitting and listen to the meeting.  One of the English members set us up with his earphones, and we were laughing with the elders because it was Fast and Testimony Meeting and the poor elder who was translating had quite a job keeping up with all the interesting topics that people chose to speak about!  

After church was over we headed up to the top of Mt Rokko that overlooks the city.  It was very snowy!   

 And Rafe finally decided to succumb to asleep, so we didn't hike to any observation points (and we also bypassed the International Museum of Music Boxes, which I thought sounded intriguing . . .).  We would have felt very out of place in the crowd that was up there hiking around anyway--lots of really old Japanese people with parkas and crampons!  They don't mess around with their winter hiking . . .

And that is the end of our Kobe trip!