Saturday, January 8, 2011

goodbye to kokokumaru, posing birds and china-street in kobe

soooo, i haven't made any real post in a while. i was really not doing much since from dec 29 to jan 04 everybody was on holidays and so moto and i mainly spent that time at his place.

tuesday 28th was my last day of work at kokokumaru. they sorted through all the books and stuff, i wasn't really much of a help and so the only thing i did was carrying bags full of old magazines and paper downstairs. takahashi san gave his books (a collection of old japanese medicine packaging (a rarity, the publisher doesn't exist any more), one containing all his work, the one that he and makiko made about the doll who was missing a leg and and a book about all the fonts he created) to me as a present and said that he really enjoyed having me in his office and that i could visit him anytime. aaah, so sad, i really didn't want to leave!

after everything was sorted, we went to have the new year's and goodbye dinner. and since makiko is leaving, too (she's going to tokyo, after working for kokokumaru for 11 years), it was a double-goodbye.
at the restaurant i saw something that 1st made me want to throw up immediately and 2nd made me sooo happy that i'm vegetarian. takahashi san ordered a lobster kind of thing. what came to the table was the lobster ripped in two halves, his legs torn out and the raw flesh wrapped around them. and it was still alive. this may seem like a perfectly normal thing to a japanese, but to me it was one of the cruelest things i have ever seen.
but anyway, the rest of the evening was very nice and then we finally said goodbye. müüüh.

and now to some pictures! on dec 30 moto and i went to kobe, his hometown, which is about 40 minutes by train from osaka. on the way we stopped in rokko to eat waffles in an original dutch wafelhuis. oh, they were good!






in kobe we took a futuristic train to one of the artificial islands in kobe harbor to get to a birds and flowers garden (kobe kachoen). the birds were flying past our ears, sitting on peoples outstretched arms and posing elegantly for the cameras.








on the way back moto and i received a lot of bewildered looks while we were trying to capture the ride in what in the late 70s was the future and which still is pretty impressive.






we didn't have that much time left, so we quickly walked through some otaku-stores (stores selling dolls, figurines and other useless, wantwantwant stuff) and china-town-street.






this was kobe. coming soon: the new year and the prophecy, that traveling west is really a bad idea for me this year.


   

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