Pictures!
Here's a picture of the hotel I stayed at. It was a really nice hotel, actually, even if it's hard to tell from just the outside.
So here's a picture I took looking through the window of my hotel room. Nice view from the 12th floor.
One of the first things we saw in Sannomiya was the "Marui Marui" building. As you'll see in the picture below, it's labeled "0101" which is read "Marui Marui" because a circle is a "maru" in Japanese, and then the 1 is represented by "i" for the first sound of "ichi." There's also a Hitachi building right next to this one.
One place that seems rather famous is the flower clock that's just a few blocks south of the train station, on Flower Road. It's really made of flowers, but it has some sort of artificial material for the hands that actually seem to keep time. Behind and slightly to the right of the clock there's what looks like a totem pole. We never figured out what that was for.
Here's a picture of an ordinary intersection in Sannomiya. It's worth noting that the crosswalks for busy intersections are *much* wider than they ever are in America. This one isn't a terribly busy one. I've seen crosswalks that are probably twice as wide as this one, and filled with people, too. You can see the walk sign glowing red right now. Most of the intersections around here chirp like a bird when it's safe to walk, for blind people. When I was in Kawachi-Nagano on the southeast side of Osaka, we had what they called "shingou no uta," or "song of the traffic lights" which was an actual melody played for the blind people. I've only heard that once or twice around here. Also, in the center distance, you can see an orange gate, called a "torii." I think there's probably a Shinto shrine over there, and that's the gate to it.
The next picture is of the front gate to the Motomachi shopping road. It looked like stained-glass, which seems kinda rare in Japan, so I had to take a picture. This shopping road though is really long, like at least ten blocks or so, and contains two or three levels of shops on both sides. We spent a lot of time there that first Wednesday, and Jeff and I have gone back there a couple of times since then, too. If you knew where to look, you could find almost anything to buy in Motomachi it seems.
While we were in Motomachi, we saw the Kobe Port Tower from a distance and decided to go visit it. We didn't go inside because that would have cost like 600 yen per person, but we walked all around it and took pictures. Here's a picture I took of the whole tower from far back on a walkway along Kobe Bay. On the top of the tower it says "Port of Kobe." Looks like it could be a postcard, doesn't it? ^^
Somewhere along the way, we wandered by what looked like a Buddhist temple in the middle of the city. Of course, I had to take a picture.
Okay, that's enough for now. I have to go do stuff. More pictures later though!