Japan Day 7

Today basically concludes our trip. Tomorrow we’re just packing our bags and heading to the airport. Today’s feature includes Yokohama and the rage that accompanies it.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s the fact that last night it rained so the entire day was cloudy and gloomy, maybe it’s the fact that I was sick and coughing every 15 minutes stuffing myself with cough drops and lemon water. Maybe it’s just the fact that it’s the end of the trip and I guess I’m pretty much tired and ready to go home. In any case, I didn’t really enjoy Yokohama as much as I thought I would have, but on the other hand, I don’t think going to HaruComi wouldn’t have been any better  – and at this point I’m pretty much out of ideas on what we could have done otherwise.

The train ride was pretty long and there was an annoying baby screaming like half way until we figured out there was an express train and switched to it. When we got to Minato Mirai it was really nice. The shopping mall inside was huge and had I known what lies ahead I really would have just spend more time here to be honest. There’s also an amusement park on the harbor but I wasn’t in the condition to get my guts thrown around.

We went up to the observatory which was nice and we had hoped to finally see the Mt. Fuji we weren’t able to see because of the clouds. Yeaaa…as you can see, there was no Mt. Fuji seeing for us! Thank you shitty weather, you ruined my entire vacation and made me sick.

Well at least I got to take some nice photos and next door we walked over to the Mitsubishi museum which was more of a science museum rather than like an electronics museum like the Sony Showroom was in Ginza. They had lots of nice mini models of planes, nice boats and all sorts of environmental devices like solar panels/wind panels. They also had

Jupitar.

Anyway after the science museum we headed to Shin Yokohama to check out the Ramen museum…

I wish I had done my research on what the actual museum was like. From the outside it seems pretty normal right? Average museum etc. However when you walk in all you see is a massive gift shop with no explanation on where the fuck anything is. Then you pick up a guide book which there was fortunately one in English, which lists that all the actual ramen places you can eat at, are downstairs. When you go down the stairs it looks like they once took what was a bath house and turned it into a ramen eating place.

When you finally get downstairs to go to the restaurant you want, it looks like you’re headed towards the entrance of some kind of haunted house. The passageway is dark and narrow and a clausterphobic’s worst nightmare. Not only that, the LINE to even GET to any of the food places stretches to be at least an hour long. It’s like 2 PM, my breakfast was a cup of yogurt 5 hours ago and you want me to wait in line in some clausterphobic ghetto basement? Fuck that shit. We ditched the ghetto museum after spending about 15 minutes and started walking towards the train station. We stopped and had lunch at another branch of Ootouya where we could sit in a big open room while we waited for our cheap delicious food to be delivered to us.

Hinano does not wait in lines for food.

Next we headed down to Chinatown. Meh Chinatown. It seemed so glorified in movies/dramas but when we got there it felt really no different from the NY Chinatown except there’s probably less white-people-hating Chinese in this one than in the NY one. Since we had lunch we didn’t bother stopping in any of the food places and we just browsed a couple gift shops and left.

The entire trip sorta felt anti-climatic combined with the fact that I spent most of last night coughing my lungs out instead of sleeping so I kept dozing off on the train back. I was also pissed off that I wasted time and train fare money on Shin Yokoshittyhama and the ghetto ramen museum. We came back to Ikebukuro and stopped by Bic Camera so I could pick up a pair of those headphones that like go over your ear as an alternative to earbuds and regular headphones. Also picked up bagels for tomorrow’s breakfast and got the deposits back for our Suica cards since god knows when I’ll go to Japan again.

I spent the remainder of my yen (12,000 to be exact) on Webmoney for my online game and while we were in the observatory JP bought himself an uchiwa:

In conclusion I guess I enjoyed my trip but after I got sick things just went downhill. I wanted to get with Moy and Animemiz for a final dinner but Moy got sick and animemiz went off to some concert or something.  I wanted to do more walking on the pier at Yokohama but it was so windy even near the buildings that I thought if I was on the pier I’d be blown into the water. I was told this kind of weather is actually unusual for this time of year and I’m disappointed that the weather really ruined a lot of this trip. It was really a nuisance on how early everything closes and how late everything opens. A lot of plans were gone down the toilet because of all these hours. I can’t wait to get home and take some hard core American medicine because this Japanese medicine isn’t doing shit. e_e; Maybe one day I’ll come back to Japan, to perhaps the Kyoto area but for now I just want to go home.

JP:

1: As for the trip in general, it seems like we spent about exactly as much time as we probably should have. Any time less and we’d probably think that there was something that we would regret missing, but any more and we’d run out of things to do. All in all, I think my biggest surprise was just how late a lot of stuff opens and how early a lot of stuff closes. While yeah, there are the places around the big train stations that close at like 3am, I’m talking more about how all the museums in Ueno closed by like 4:30. I would’ve assumed that that kind of stuff would’ve been open until around at least 8:00 or something.

2: At the observatory deck at Landmark Tower, there was a shota wearing a Char Custom Zaku shirt.

3: There were also a lot more badly behaved children than I would’ve expected, both in the sense that I thought that every child would be well behaved, and in the sense that I thought that there wouldn’t be many children.

4: For the millionth time, I’m still amazed at how cheap Japanese food is, especially compared to the Western food in Tokyo.

5: That Seibu over the Ikebukuro station is pretty damn impressive. After three trips through the grocery store in the basement, I still get hopelessly lost.

6: Now I’m tempted to rewatch Durarara and see if I can recognize anything.

7: Those washlets will make your asshole maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad clean.

8: The toilet in the Shin-Yokohama station bathroom was the dirtiest one that I’ve seen in Tokyo, which is to say that it was probably about as dirty as your average American public restroom. Think more highway rest area McDonalds, less Barnes and Noble.

9: The 7-11 near our hotel was I believe the only convenience store out of the half-dozen or so that we went into that sold porn.

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