Fireworks – Summer Festival

Fireworks over Kobe Harbour

On Saturday night (8th July) Kobe had a massive fireworks display, it was superb! We headed down amongst all the crowds on the tube to Port Island, a manmade island in the sea, it’s really big and doesn’t feel like your on a manmade island but it’s weird to think about. A lot of people wore summer Kimono’s (Yukata) both men and women and I watched the fireworks across the harbour with 1000’s of people from Kobe before hitting the town afterwards.

Me with a Japanese Couple in traditional Yukata who were sitting next to me (other JET's in the background)

Me, Yulia from Russia and her Japanese boyfriend and Andy from Melbourne in The Hub - an English pub in downtown Kobe

Andy and Andy and two random Japanese fellas in a club called Trinity

I had a good first weekend in Kobe – another guy called Andy, from Melbourne, invited me to the beach to meet 7 "hot Japanese girls" at a BBQ who wanted to meet Gaijin!?! he had his eye on one so that left, hmmm 6 for me!?! Ha ha.

In the end it didn’t happen as Andy thought they changed their plans in case of rain, we met some other JET’s and went to a not-so-good little beach where an old Japanese man shouted at me and the others, at first I couldn’t work out why and the others didn’t understand his Japanese but in the end we worked out that he wasn’t happy about us setting up camp in what was supposed to be a car park. We had a mat down for these guy’s two dogs to sit on and a tarp up to give them shade. Andy said he had never seen Japanese shout Oi! in anyone’s face like that before – he said it was rare but old people in Japan speak their mind a little more, they no longer have to show respect, it is for others to show respect to them so some take advantage apparently.... Grumpy old Bastard!

After that we went to another beach that was a lot better and played Frisbee and swam before heading home exhausted – the heat and activity together with jet lag really takes it out of you!

I never heard from my teacher, Andy said that the Japanese are the flakiest nation on the earth, constantly making plans and either changing them or not following them through I guess I’ll see if that’s true in time – but I was happy enough as I was really tired after the beach.