Much and more

Rather than spending the long weekend indoors as planned, we've just spent 3 days wandering the suburbs of Kobe and enjoying some of the seasonal events. Autumn is fairly frenzied here - I suppose everyone realises there's a fairly small window between the extremes and struggles to fit everything into the Goldilocks band between baking and freezing. Like most things that draw us from the nest, these particular events were for foodin' and boozin' - a tour of our local sake breweries on Saturday and an outdoor food festival on Sunday.

Put some effort into it

Given our last experience at what turned out to be a fire-blasted wooden house, I had imagined most sake breweries were little weatherboards full of old blokes in wellies. Sake seems to be big business though - the ones we went to reminded me more of the slick Asahi brewery than anything, and walking around the area reminded me of the cellar doors in Margaret River. The first spot we went to was attached to a museum, full of serious-faced mannequins showing off each step of the brewing process. We were ushered into a little room and shown a corporate video (narrated by an American man who had spent his life smoking cigarettes and drinking caramel fudge) that insisted they were selling cultural enlightenment and fun with friends rather than anything in a bottle. Nevertheless, the bottles awaited in the tasting area and we tried a few different kinds before buying our favourite one, along with a couple of little sake barrel-shaped bottles to put it in.

Careful, you're going to get laughs on everyone

The next stop was our lunch spot, which was connected to another sake brewery and more tastings. Those who figured there wasn't enough sake involved could order themselves more to go with lunch and several did; the "single serve" was big enough to send 4 people into space. Lunch itself was a series of little bowls of fish, chicken and tofu arranged in the shape of a cherry blossom leaf, followed by some sashimi and tempura. Once we had struggled through the last of the sake, we zigzagged our way along the pathway to the next brewery where we finally found an old bloke in wellies.

"I drink 3 of these for breakfast"

He turned out to be an ex-brewer and explained some of the old ways sake was made before the big shiny vats and men in surgical masks. To demonstrate he grabbed a volunteer from the tour group and skooshed the rice around with her, singing all the while; apparently that's how they kept track of time in the pre-watch days. Then it was over to the fridges for more tasting - lemon sakes and plum wine and brandy that would strip paint. Maybe it was the fumes talking, but I was actually quite enjoying the taste of everything by this point and could see the appeal of sitting down with an ice-cold flask of it. We had one more spot to go to after this one which was probably a good thing because a marching band had started practicing in my head. We hardly even pretended with this one - we had a quick whip around to look at the different brewing equipment and then had our last couple of tastes before our final red-faced group photo. We were given little sake cups as souvenirs which was quite nice, then picked our way home and retreated out of the beating sun.

On Sunday a park in Sannomiya was hosting what seemed to be a big food and wine festival, where a lot of the local restaurants had set up marquees, portable stoves and beer machines for anyone who wanted to have an impromptu picnic. We ended up with a plate of tapas from a Spanish restaurant and some curry and naan from an Indian one, which we washed down with a couple of cups of suspiciously cheap wine. The coffee shop was sold out, so we had to content ourselves with Rokko beer and some stroopwafels to take home for dessert later. It seemed like an extraordinary amount of effort had gone into what was a one-day event but the food was lovely and it was nice to sit on the grass and people watch for a while. Two Japanese girls with accordions were walking around serenading groups of people, there was a sausage dog who spent most of the time sitting up like a meerkat and everybody seemed to have a unicycle or a baton to twirl around. Don't ask me why - I just work here.