Wind Surfing / VISSEL KOBE

Went down south in Hyogo this weekend with my supervisor to go windsurfing with his brother and his dad. The roads round here are wicked, it was like Ridge Racer or something, can't wait til I get my car and go driving. I test drove a couple of cars on fri, but they were both kei cars - a special class of car here which are smaller, cheaper (for insurance, parking, road toll), but only have an engine of 0.6 litres so feel like you're driving a lawnmower. I'm going to hold out for a proper car, a bit more pricey, but worth it for the fun I'll have driving round here I reckon. Windsurfing was well fun, in a little bay just next to the city, so you feel like you're at the seaside but cars are rushing past and you can see tall office buildings in the distance, pretty cool.



After that, my supervisor's brother, who is a kimono designer from Kyoto (how cool is that) invited us to a footie game in the evening in Kobe. Turns out he's a bit of an obsessive fan of Vissel Kobe. He was disappointed to learn I wasn't a massive football fan in the UK, and kept asking me what football chants I knew. Turns out they have the same ones here but with different words. The match was really cool, at first seemed a bit odd as the crowd was just chanting in perfect unison with no other noise in between, but as the beer started flowing people started loosening up. I got really into it and am going to the next game as well, should be good. The match itself was amazing, at half time Kobe was a man down and a goal down, and then equalized in the second half, and scored the winning goal in stoppage time! Storybook finish.