Today we got moving early and headed to Nara (about an hour train ride). There's a giant park there with deer and a temple. The walk over to the temple area was about 1.5 km. After a few minutes, there was a man selling "deer cookies" with a group of deer hanging around. The deer were all sizes (the males had their antlers shaved down in most cases) and were all over the place. We bought some cookies (just large wafer-like crackers) and the deer were on us. Some of the deer are trained to take a cookie and bow - these were not them. These guys were aggressive and followed me (Dave refused to hold the cookies!) and started biting at my shirt. They were hard to shake, but once the cookies were gone, they were fairly docile.
We walked over to the temple and watched everyone getting assaulted by deer. It was pretty funny. There was also some kind of event in the park area where there were lots of vendors set up selling food and there was some music. We made it to the temple (after walking through row after row of gift shops) and paid a few bucks to get in. This temple has the world's largest bronze Buddha statue, so we looked at that and a few other of the status in the temple. They were selling all sorts of charms on the way out to bless you for this or that. We didn't get blessed, but instead headed back to the train station to head to Kobe (another 1 hour-ish train ride).
We got off at a station in the middle of nowhere (that seemed to happen a lot) and walked a bit to find a famous Sake museum. They had life-size exhibits and videos in English, but we kind of breezed through. We were tired and hot from the walk (most of our walks to places involved a lot of getting lost), so we sampled some sakes and left. This area in Kobe is responsible for 25% of the country's sake production, so there were lots of breweries. We thought that they'd be close together and easy to find - nope!
We found another one that just had a tour bus drop off a bunch of tourists (I think they were Chinese) and were packed inside so we skipped it and headed to another one. We found one where you could actually see the production (only one guy was working at the time), but it was cool to see. Then we went to sample some and Dave loved the guy pouring. He looked like the guy from Big Trouble in Little China, with one eye half closed. We tried a bunch of sake and bought one that was smooth and sweet. The lemon sakes were also really good, but were similar to limecello, so we skipped those and also didn't want to carry it back.
After this, we left and headed to Steakland, where we heard you could get good Kobe beef at a reasonable price. Kobe was hopping at this time with nightlife and there were tons of Kobe beef places. We ducked into Steakland and it was filled up, so the hostess walked us about a block away to another location on the 5th floor where we were seated at a teppanaki table. This makes sense as forks and steak knives aren't really a thing in Japan, so they had to cut it up first so you can eat with chopsticks.
The dinners were huge - either a full set with appetizers, seafood and dessert, or the "satisfying" portion, which included salad, soup, grilled veggies, bread or rice and coffee. We went with that one. You could also order the Kobe beef or the "special" Kobe beef. No idea of the difference. We got a special one and then a special loin cut. There was also tenderloin - not sure of the difference. Service here sucked (as did most restaurant service in Japan) and we had to ask the teppanaki chef to get us our soup since they never brought it out to us (but did to the Japanese couple next to us). They brought out the steaks and they looked beautiful, except that the more expensive one had quite a bit of fat on it.
First he dumped garlic butter on the grill and some potato chips and mixed those up (so random). Next came some veggies (mushrooms, sprouts, zucchini and something else we couldn't tell what it was) and then he grilled up the steak. The steak was good, but not epic. I think that we were expecting the best steak we ever had, but that didn't happen. Oh well - we had Kobe beef in Kobe.
We were going to head to Chinatown, but decided to call it the night and find the train back home.
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