03/29 - Kobe

Today we went to Kobe and stayed in a hotel, which was a nice change
from hostels. The first stop in Kobe was the disaster reduction and
human renovation institution museum, which were two totally different
museums. The disaster reduction museum was about the 1995 earthquake
and how Kobe recovered. It started off with a movie simulating the
earthquake from various points in Kobe and even simulated the floor
shaking. Afterwards you walked through a recreation of the streets
after an earthquake, which was really neat. As we walked through, a
guide came and was explaining everything to us with was very useful.
There was also this cool touch screen map, like google earth, that
showed danger regions for tusnamis. We were shown models on how
buildings have changed to be earthquake resistant, the coolest of
which is building the structure on a floating platform on rollers.

After we were done with the earthquake museum we went to the connected
museum, which was weird. I think the overall theme was to appreciate
life and had movies to calm you down and displays about the circle or
life. We played this weird drum game where you had to hit theme
sensors to the beat of the music.

The next stop was the maiko prominade under Akishi kaikyo bridge which
was an tunnel thing under the bridge, which is also the worlds longest
suspension bridge. It was pretty neat and a different view of the
bridge.

We then went to city hall to go to the observation deck. Kobe is
pretty big but we went during the day so it wasn't as pretty.

Afterwards we went to eat dinner at a buffet restaurant. The best
stuff they had were little cubes of Kobe beef so I ate a bunch of
that. We were only allowed to eat for 90 minutes which we used in its
entirety. That probably wasn't a good idea as I felt really full
afterwards.

Dima and I made a quick stop at meriken park to see the earth quake
memorial and take pictures of the port tower, maritime museum, and the
oriental hotel. Near the park was a huge double decker highway which
seemed pretty dangerous to have in an earthquake zone.

On our way back we got a bit lost but a local guy walked with us back
to the jr line.