We’re now in Kobe, having traveled here by shinkansen from Tokyo yesterday. Sorry for the lack of bloggage but our days have been busy and I haven’t been particularly feeling like typing. The quick summary of events since my last post is that we went back to Ginza the next day for more strolling and window-shopping. We arrived in Kobe yesterday afternoon and poked around Chinatown and the nearby shopping areas. I fulfilled one of the quests for this trip, which was to obtain a new handle-less teapot for brewing gyokuro. Shortly we’re heading for more or less the same area, since we kind of whipped through part of it on the mistaken assumption that we’d pass through it on the way back. It’s raining today so we’ll mostly stick to the covered shopping streets.
Here’s a snapshot of the view from our room, taken last night:

I’ll try to post some more photos tonight, along with some observations about how knowing a little bit of a foreign language is at least as confusing as knowing none at all.