Kon'nichiwa!

Kon'nichiwa!  Ogenki desuka?

Our adventure has begun!  Tang and I made it safely to Osaka, Japan on July 18.  Our flights were uneventful but very long.  Eleven and a half hours of sitting in one spot can be wearing.

Once we arrived in Osaka, we took a ferry across the bay to Kobe, which is home base for the next few days.  Tang is attending a conference with his lab here. Once we settled into the hotel, we met up with some of his lab mates and boss for dinner in the heart of Kobe - Sannomiya Station.

Sannomiya Station is where all the train, bus and subway lines converge in the city.  You have to go through Sannomiya to go anywhere else, and, as a result, the area around the station has lots of shops and restaurants.  And there are lots of them, packed into basements and stacked on top of each other in high rise buildings.

Finding dinner proved to be a bit tricky.  While there were a plethora of food options, most of them had signs outside their doors that looked like this:

...which none of us could read.  We finally picked a restaurant at random and went inside.  And God bless the waitress, she was the most patient helpful person we could have gotten as 5 hungry Americans who couldn't read any Japanese.  The menu had no pictures or English words at all, but this lovely woman was able to help us with basic words like "steak", "hamburger" and "fish", which was good enough for us!    Our food was excellent. :D

Today, July 19, has been pretty low-key.  Tang had conference-y things to do, and I walked around the area of our hotel, which is in a residential part of Kobe.  After lunch, we went down to the Chinatown-area of Kobe, called Nankinmachi.  Had more great food and did lots of window shopping.  Below are some pictures of our first few adventures.

Breakfast from 7-Eleven!  They have a great selection of tasty breakfast foods.

Tang eating soba noodles, which are made from buckwheat flour.

Liz with a Chinese crispy duck pancake

Lunch sampler: Tempura ebi (shrimp), rice, egg drop soup, egg roll, salad, tripe (which was really tasty!) and fruit cocktail