Japan Day 12 (jū ni)

Today we headed out for Yokohama. Tomoko and Hide live in the Yokohama area so they kindly offered to show us around. This was our first try at using a train outside of the metro subway system. It's much easier when only 1 train comes along a single track. However at a normal train station apparently, multiple trains depart on the same tracks, which makes it challenging to pick the right one. Unfortunately all the departure information was in kanji. I tried to pick out Yokohama but wasn't very successful. We finally asked a station attendant which train and he pointed us to the right one. Or at least one that went to Yokohama.

We took the limited express which makes several stops on the way. There is a commuter express that makes very few and thus gets there much faster. There is also a local which stops at every station. You definitely don't want to take that one. But we discovered all this once we got to Yokohama, and had gone one past our stop because we got on another limited express that skipped the stop we wanted. That's when we saw the nice map that showed all this in detail.

Anyway, after arriving 45 minutes late we met Tomoko and Hide and started our Yokohama adventure. Our first stop was the Anpanman museum.



All of Anpanman's buddies are food items. So of course they had a nice bakery with pastries in the shapes of all the characters.


After this we headed over to Chinatown (Chūkagai) to grab some lunch.


Here are our gracious hosts:


We ate lunch at a nice Chinese buffet that Tomoko found. It sure helps having a native speaker to grease to wheels.

All along the streets were little vendors selling food and tchotchkes. There also were a ton of roasted chestnut vendors. I tried my first ever roasted chestnut.


After Chinatown we headed over to a park on the bay. Who knew shipping containers could be art?


The area with the Landmark tower that we wanted to go to was a bit of a walk, so we decided to take a water-taxi. The 'Sea-Bass' is the one we took.


Here's a nice view of the Yokohama Bay Bridge from our boat.


Our hosts just chillin...


When we landed we went to these two Red Brick Warehouses. They were built in 1911 and 1913 as a symbol of the modernization of Yokohama port. They have businesses, shops, and cafes in them now.


From there we walked to the World Porters mall so we could walk part way in air conditioning.


We have to walk alllll the way over to that big building.


The Nippon Maru is moored right at the base of the Landmark Tower.



We zipped up to the 69th floor of the Landmark Tower in an express elevator that took about 30 seconds. From there we had spectacular views of the Yokohama area. Here's the path we took today:


Admiral Perry is an icon in Yokohama, being the first Westerner to really 'open up' Japan. He even has chocolate bars.


On our way out of the Landmark Tower we ran into...

wait for it...

another mall!


We stopped off for a Mango boba at a Hawaiian cafe, then headed outside for the metro station.

Tomoko and Hide guided us to the proper station and showed us the right train to take, then we bid them goodbye and headed back to Tokyo.



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