Travels to the east: My first day in Japan

So I have arrived in Kobe and I will be here for the next week. I took a flight from JFK in NY with a change over in Seattle. Total travel time from wheels up to wheels down, not including trips to and from airports- 19 hours. Kobe and the surrounding area is very neat and clean with will laid out infrastructure.


One of the first things I notice were three large Ferris wheels, like the large on in London, on the hour bus ride from Kensi Airport to my hotel, the Okura Kobe. Also, there is some construction ongoing right next to the hotel. The construction workers wear outfits that look like they below in a 70s B sci-fi movie. The have rows of blinking Christmas lights on the chest. I don’t think a picture does it justice so I have included this so video.

After arriving at the hotel we took a quick walk around to locate a quick bite of food and some provisions for the room. After doing a quick round of an open air shopping mall we settle on buying a pizza. It was small and really expensive. I thought I was immune to price shock being from NY and paying Manhattan prices, but our 10” pizza was 1680 yen- about 23 dollars. Two 1.5 liter bottles of soda and 4-pack of green tea were about 12 dollars. At a 7-11 in NY I would estimate the equal to be around six bucks, at most.