Tuesday, May 06, 2008

GW #4: Kobe-iton~

神戸いとん~
The 5th and final day of the most epic Golden Week in history began pretty early with me screaming in pain from my still lingering sunburn and mornin's futile attempt to ice my arms down, pain, nothing but pain! Made it up and out of bed and then the bad news came pouring in... rain. I think that the chance had gone up to 90% for rain starting around noon (1st pitch was at 1:00). But, like the troopers we are, we headed out of the dude? hole at just before 10am and worked our way over to Sannomiya (三ノ宮)station in Kobe and picked up a couple of things at the Buffaloes team store before searching around the dirty ass area of town for some beer. The first place we (finally) found was a Family Mart that didn't sell beer... luckily there was a Lawson right next door, under construction... so we finally made it to an AmPm and picked up the beer and headed back to the station and then over to Skymark Stadium! We arrived at the stadium at around 12:00 and found our seats pretty quickly, pretty decent seats too. I was immediately impressed by the stadium as it had a much more sophisticated feeling than most stadiums here, it was spacious, and felt very modern, and was surrounded by trees. One other feature was that the space between rows of seats seemed wider so my knees were never being pressed into someones back! The stadium was really, really good! For sure in my top 5. The only negative really was the concessions, it took 40 mins before the game (and through the end of the 1st inning) to get my giant wiener! All-n-all it was really cool to see Skymark, and it was a really good game to see too, as the Buffaloes scored 5 runs in the bottom of the 8th and held on in the 9th for a 6-3 victory! It sprinkled a little around the 8th inning or so, but that was it for the rain... at the game... Here are some pics from the game:
After the game we jumped back on the train and headed back over to Sannomiya station to... STEAKLAND! Yes! This was one of my goals for the trip,to eat the famed Kobe beef (神戸牛), in Kobe! It did not disappoint! Man that shit was good! All the things you hear about it are true, it melts in your mouth, and it is tasty! We went to Steakland Kobe because it was cheap as hell! Well... in comparison to other places at least, I ended up going with the Kobe-gyu Sirloin steak set which came in at 4480 yen. It was all soooooo good! Here's some pics, my favorite is the fat kid looking on while they cook up our steak!
Finally, we headed over to Kobe station and some place called "Mosaic" to do a little shopping, eat some sweets, spill some beer and re-enact the "proposal scene". It was a nice place, very new, and pretty. We didn't get much of a chance to check out Kobe's famed "night view" because we were in a bit of a hurry to get back to the Shinkansen station to head back to Tokyo, and it started raining too, but it was cool, Kobe was very nice (except for the dirty side streets of Sannomiya) and I'd like to head back sometime and spend a bit more time there. Pics:

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