Kobe weekend

Well, just a Saturday, but it was an interesting one. I met Chelsey there around lunchtime, which was nice because she'd figured out where Chinatown was, so we could have some good Chinese food for lunch. Kobe is kind of the "foreigner" city in Japan; it's had a relatively high number of foreign residents. Consequently, it has a pretty nice Chinatown. The main square had a couple of restaurants with lines stretching around the block. I'm not sure what made them so good, or so popular. We walked down the street a bit and found a restaurant without a line, but with delicious food.
After lunch we went down to Port Island to an ice-skating rink that Chelsey had found. It's actually an indoor facility that is a pool in the summer and a rink in the winter. Chelsey hadn't been skating for about eight years, while I think it had been at least a decade for me. Consequently, I was a little nervous, and we were both a bit shaky at first. It went pretty well, though, we quickly remembered how to do it and didn't have any falls. By the end we were going quite a bit faster than when we first got out there. Of course, the 10-year-old figure skating girls were almost literally skating rings around me, but that's OK.
We finished in the same place Chelsey started the day - at an import grocery store near the train station. We picked up some Dr. Pepper, some soup, some oatmeal, and various other hard-to-find items that sounded good.
-Jason