The saga of Sunday April 27, 2025 to Monday April 28, 2025 travelling between Kobe, Japan and Osaka, Japan
I woke up at 5:00 a.m. again because of the streaming sun that even my sleep mask couldn’t block out. I was in desperate need of a shower and finally had the opportunity to experience my first Japanese shower room. The setup is designed so that you wash completely outside the tub. You sit on a small stool, rinse, soap, rinse again, and only then enter the tub, which is meant purely for soaking. Conceptually, I get it. It’s clean, efficient, and communal in spirit. But I still found it strange nonetheless. I’m sure I used it wrong.
After showering, I ran out to grab more food before we returned to the Jewish Center, where we had been told we could store our bags for the day.
We opted to spend the day at the Kobe Nabokini Herb Garden, per the Rebbetzin’s recommendation.
The Kobe Nabokini Herb Garden sits high above the city on the side of Mount Rokko and is accessible by cable car. It offers sweeping views of Kobe Harbor and carefully terraced gardens filled with herbs, flowers, and walking paths that wind their way back down the mountain.
The boys loved the cable car ride, with its spectacular views on the way up. Slowly, we began making our way down through the garden. The boys stopped to smell and examine Every. Single. Herb. And. Flower. I cannot adequately express how much I love that each of our boys has learned to literally stop and smell the roses. Although this should come with a warning: people who stop to smell the roses, may risk running late to everything and find themselves sprinting to catch their scheduled train.
We paused to try lavender ice cream. Amichai and I agreed it was tasty at first, but a full cone was too much for either of us.
The gardens end at the Nabokini Waterfalls, which the boys and I had just visited the previous day. They felt strongly that Chaim could experience the waterfalls, too. It was obvious their positive memories of the waterfalls were connected to the socialization they had with new friends. They realized it wasn’t as exciting to them the second time around with just the family.
When we returned to the Jewish Center, I purchased an absurd amount of kosher meat. Matanel and Eitan were very clearly losing weight. Although it completely wrecked our budget, my immediate mission became fattening those boys up with as much meat as humanly possible.
Shopping completed, we caught a train to Osaka and arrived at our new Airbnb around 6:00 p.m.
Nope. No. No way.
The Airbnb was a small, one-bedroom space with a tiny “kitchen.” There was a low, squat table next to the bed, which was fine. What was not fine were the beds blocking the only access to the door, and the fact that the door was right next to the kitchen. This was not going to work. We could not, in good conscience, put our children in a situation where a fire or other emergency could become catastrophic because of the physical layout of the room.
Before I could contact Airbnb to explain that this was not workable, I had to run to the grocery store to pick up provisions and make dinner. The store was sizeable, but the produce section was less robust than I expected. On the other hand, the seafood section was glorious. Octopus, squid, sea urchins, and so much more caught my eye. Keeping kosher meant I hadn’t really gone out of my way to notice these products before. I couldn’t believe the range of options. Had I not been rushing to feed my children, I would have happily wandered those aisles much longer, just taking it all in.
After an annoying back and forth with the host and Airbnb customer support, both of whom maintained there was no safety issue from their perspective, the host finally agreed to let us stay for one night and cancel the remainder of the reservation with a full refund. During this exchange, Chaim managed to secure another Airbnb with five bedrooms and a better location for the exact same price.
We went to bed that night with one eye and one ear open, just in case we needed to exit quickly in the middle of the night.
The following morning, the boys did their schoolwork and Hebrew tutoring. It was rainy, and they had no interest in going out. My only excursion was a quick trip to the grocery store to grab lunch. Again, I zipped through the aisles to get back home, this time because Chaim had left for work and the boys were home alone.
At 3:00 p.m., we left the one-room apartment and took a cab to our new home. When we walked in, everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief. Not only were there five bedrooms, which thrilled the boys because it meant each of them had his own room for the first time in their lives, but the house was beautiful, clean, and genuinely inviting.
After putting our things down, the boys and I walked about five minutes through Kuromon Market to a movie theater to see the Minecraft movie.
Kuromon Market is a lively, covered food market known for its fresh seafood, street food, and specialty vendors. It turns out this is where all the produce in Osaka was hiding, vibrant, abundant, and beautifully displayed. Had I not been on a tight timeline, I could have happily lingered there far longer.
The boys thought the movie was hilarious. Only afterward did I realize it was still the omer (a spiritual counting toward the holiday of Shavuot with minor restrictions), which we had been counting and observing. My eagerness to find something to do on a rainy day had conveniently erased that from my mind. Oh well. Rather than ignore it and pretend everything was fine, I named what had happened to the boys. In true Amichai fashion, he worried we had done something wrong. It turned into a meaningful conversation about how challenging it can be to maintain traditions, rituals, and religious observance when you are not living in a community that is operating on the same calendar and rhythms.
After stuffing themselves with hot dogs, the boys went to sleep.
Chaim stayed at a hotel that night so he could participate in his team’s work-a-thon on American hours. As the apartment finally went quiet, I found myself thinking about how this journey keeps asking us to practice our values without the scaffolding of familiarity or community. It isn’t always neat. But it is real.
