kobe and vietnamese food

So Kobe was nothing more than a big city, if you didn't catch my point in the last entry. Frustration, one may call it, but entirely justified from someone who cringes at the sight of industrialization. Excuse me for wanting to hug a tree once in a while, but sometimes i get the urge. There was much walking, the three of us being Alex the Canadian and Michelle the Briton and I, and there was absolutely no accomplishing of goals, though there were many humble goals to be accomplished, such as buying Alex a digital camera, finding a bookstore that happened to be closed down, finding another bookstore that happened to be closed, and getting to the top of a high-rise building via elevator. We almost achieved that one, except that the elevator never went up after we got off on the second-most high floor, which was the "Sky Lounge". Apparently, the top floor was a private restaurant, and when the door finally opened I asked the woman in the elevator if it was going up, in Japanese, and she replied in English, No, down! Alex observed that it was in fact going up, and that she had lied through her teeth. Perhaps we weren't dressed in our Sunday best. But that's no excuse to lie to us, let alone in our own language! Kobe's special is beer-fed cow meat, and the prospects of eating this delicacy did not exactly thrill me. So all in all, Kobe is a Japanese city. Nothing much more to say. They have good Indian food though.
After this charade which proved to be highly entertaining mostly because we achieved absolutely nothing, I hopped back on the bus and arrived in Tokushima in time to go to dinner with a Vietnamese family who invited me out. The wife of the family is my classmate in Japanese class, and i had helped her husband with the grammar in his biochemistry paper. He works as a post-doc in Tokushima University. They had taken me out to lunch already and bought me a white dress shirt, and now dinner at a Japanese-Vietnamese restaurant. So generous I had to get them a small box of little cakes in Kobe. The dinner was interesting because I conversed with the wife and child in Japanese and the husband in Engish, because despite spending 5 or so years in Japan, spoke nor understood a word of the country's language. He was the only one whose English was good though.
That is that and more will surely come.