kobe beefin'

So while my last trip to Kobe involved staying at a capsule hotel, seeing foreigner houses, and making my way outside of Kobe, I kinda neglected to go for the main reason most people know Kobe: beef. After deciding for the third year in a row that this year is going to be my last year in Japan as a JET, I figured that I couldn't leave without trying some Kobe beef in Kobe and seeing what all the fuss was about.

So, with yet another long weekend looming, and no other major places in Japan we still were wanting to see, we figured it'd be the perfect time to make a 2 night trip to Osaka and Kobe. There wasn't much we really wanted to do in Osaka, but figured if we were making the effort to Kobe, we might as well visit Osaka for a day too, and hope we'd find something to do there.

So to recap: Planned a weekend essentially around going to Kobe for the sole purpose of eating beef. Yes, that's what my life's come to now.

And I think I'm loving it.

After finding a restaurant that had a few awards for their quality Kobe beef, We ended up with a ¥9000 (about $100) on beef. And that was the lunch special set too. All in all, we got about 130g of beef along with salad, vegetables, soup and coffee. I wouldn't say it was a steal, but not too shabby.

The awesome part of the meal was having our personal chef prepare the beef for us teppanyaki style, seeing him cook and slice the beef right in front us. Searing the beef, the chef diced the beef with his razor-sharp knife, and put a big slab on a wooden rack. Not wanting to cook all the beef at once and let it go cold as we ate it with the freshly-cooked vegetables, he cooked it piece by piece and put it on our plates, so each piece was freshly cooked, to be eaten with our choice of salt, pepper, fried garlic, ponzu, or wasabi & soy.

It was really amazing. I couldn't stop the unintentional "mmms" from coming out as I savoured each bite. And each bite, while coming from the same piece of steak, tasted kinda different in each way. We started off with a leaner piece, which was full of beefy flavour and slightly chewy. Each other piece of steak melted in your mouth as the flavour slowly spread throughout your mouth. Even the huge chunk of fat that was part of the steak wasn't wasted - it was cooked for about 15 minutes cut into smaller pieces. Eating it as it was, it surprisingly was full of flavour and not greasy at all!

I'm kinda really afraid about becoming a beef snob now. It was SO good, and especially after eating Japanese marbled beef for the last 2 and a bit years, going back to lean Aussie steak might be a struggle...

do you like typhoons?

It's the question I've been asked all day today. And, it's kinda weird that students are all saying yes... Aren't potentially-dangerous natural weather phenomenons supposed to be feared rather than liked? 

Despite the slight anxiousness I'm having about my very first typhoon experience, I can kinda understand where they're coming from. It's kinda like a snow day, where it's an excuse for everyone to not have to go to school. It's things like this that make me wish sometimes that I didn't grow up in a city that only experienced relatively mild weather.

So, if it's an unplanned day of no school, shouldn't I be more excited? Well, yeah, I would, if a "no school day" actually meant not going to school. Actually in my first year back, one of my teachers was telling me about the procedures for a typhoon - essentially a siren will sound warning everyone to stay inside their homes for safety reasons.With torrential rain and winds reaching more than 70 metres per second, people young and old alike are urged to stay home and not go to school, and the same thing is supposed to be for businesses as well. 

But for teachers, rather than stay home and you know, be safe, they're expected to report to school. For most people, that involves commuting in their car up to an hour or so... in the middle of typhoon weather. For me at the time, it meant that the moment I heard the typhoon siren, I was supposed to get on my bike and ride 30 minutes through ridiculously heavy rain, winds that are more than double the top speed of my kei-car to come to school and sit at my desk while my students that I was supposed to teach that day are all staying at home. 

I was talking about this to one of my teachers, and they were like "Yeah, teachers come to school in typhoons." seemingly nonchalant and not at all shocked that one's job stipulates commuting to school in the middle of weather so strong the national weather bureau is recommending people to stay indoors... What the hell, right?