I know, I know for sure, that life is beautiful around the world..

I woke up the next day at 7.30, feeling more rested than I have for the past 2 months. I had breakfast in the hotel, which was nice, having a wide choice of things to choose from. Seaweed goes well with noodles, by the way. I then set off to see some of the sights in Kobe.

First of all, Kobe is famous in Japan for its "western-style buildings". Epic fail for an European. Thankfully, there are also a few nice parks and a few museums that were recommended. As the hotel is right downtown, everything seemed to be in walking distance so I just set off to the nearest one, which was a carpentry museum, and was sadly closed. I then headed off to the Art museum, which was some 3 kilometers away, so provided for a nice view of the central city on my way there.

Things I noticed: they have bikes that fold in half and that you can pack up into a shoulder bag. Nice. They also have a lot of footbridges over the roads.. whose purpose is usually completely defeated by a zebra crossing right next to the bridge. Odd.

Japanese restaurants all smell very nicely. At first I could not place the smell, but then I walked by a sewer canal which smelt the same way, and then it hit me. Seaweed.

Stopping a car for speeding is a 5-man affair in Japan. One is 30 m before the others with the spedometer. If he notices a speeder, he notifies the others, who then jump in front of the car and wave it to stop. They often have to run backwards 10-20 m so as not to get hit as the car slows down. Two guys take turns doing that. One guy is the radio operator and one more just sits there and makes notes.

The art museum was really nice on the outside, but it was closed for cleaning on Monday. I will try to return there later on, though. I would not have had much time there anyways, as the conference was about to begin so I needed to make my way to the venue.

Conference itself was... well, as usual. Keynote speakers good, everyone else.. notsomuch. I did make an interesting new connection though - a person who currently runs his own ad agency in US but used to be a senior marketing manager for AOL. He had stumbled into the conference hoping to get an overview of practical IT security, but felt somewhat out of place due to all the cypto in the talks. He was a really interesting person, though, so I spent the rest of the evening with him -- went for lunch, then coffee and walked about the city just looking around, first for a Kobe beef place that also had vegetarian menu (which we did not find) and later just aimlessly to see the city. We talked for 5-6 hours, possibly even more. At some point, we were both just a bit too tired to keep on going so headed to our hotels.

The second day began just the same as the first - I woke up completely rested and full of energy, had breakfast and did a quick round to the Kobe Tower and its surrounding park before heading to the conference venue. In the train I noticed something perculiar - the seats had ads on them and they were for IWSEC, the conference I was attending. And this was not a special conference train but a standard metro train. And it is not a big conference - maybe 100 people, no more.

Again, good keynote lecturer. Talking on a topic quite similar to that which I am to present on Wednesday. So of course I asked questions and approached him after the talk and had an interesting follow-up discussion as well.

The next talks were too technical and I lost interest quickly. During the lunch break I again met up with the advertising guy. Turns out that in the US Kobe beef is very popular but - get this - they generally chop it up into hamburgers and sell 200 $ kobe beef hamburgers. Only in America :P . Conference organizers had received the notification of me being vegetarian and took it very seriously - even giving me special vegetarian soup (despite the normal version also being comletely vegetarian) and then serving me seitan instead of meat. I was the only person at the table who knew what it was. Hat tip to Rita for introducing me to it half a year ago. It was well prepared and quite tasty - definitely better than the batch I had made :)

We then went to the coffee museum, that was supposedly nearby. The advertising guy also owns a small coffee roasting company, so we basically got the equivalent of a guided tour, despite all the wall explanations being only in Japanese. And it was quite interesting to see just how delicate the process of coffee manufacture is and how much care goes into creating quality coffee.

Back to the conference after that.