Given how close Yokohama is to Tokyo, it can easily be reached by a myriad of transport options. Normally, the Shinkansen services are the fastest, but they stop at the adjacent Shin-Yokohama station and since you'd still need to take a standard JR train to reach Yokohama proper, any time advantage would be minimal. Instead, I just stuck with a normal JR Tokaido Line rapid service straight to Yokohama, which was still pretty zippy at 25-30mins.
Yokohama is a fairly nice port town on the edge of Tokyo Bay, so there were a lot of maritime sights to see. Giant ferris wheel and mini theme park, too.
Walking along the footpath towards the port area, there was this Indian fair (Holi Festival) going on outside Aka-Renga Soko.
Didn't try out the curries that were on offer (still too early for lunch and I intended to eat somewhere else that day) but I grabbed two fairly decent samosas on the way.
Went towards the major shipping terminal at Yokohama for some photo ops. Why Yokohama Harbour Terminal? Because it is probably the most surreal and abstractist form of architecture for a cruise terminal I've seen.
It's like a math major decided to wake up early one morning, grabbed too many rulers and started designing a cruise terminal. Parallelism, angles, symmetry congruence - all lumped into one building. A geometry fetishist's wet dream, so to speak.
There was also this rather peculiar old lady in the middle of the steps near the entrance to the terminal building that kept singing old-school Japanese songs (I presume it was enka, kayokyoku or something similar). Horribly out of tune yet clearly unashamed.
Walked towards Chinatown for a while. As far as my understanding goes, Yokohama's Chinatown is one of the largest in Japan. Certainly designed in a very traditionalist, elaborate Chinese fashion, as opposed to the "Chinese neighbourhood in suburbia" style of San Francisco's Chinatown.
If there's one common theme in this Chinatown, it seems to suggest that Japanese people love their pandas, buns, shark fin and dumplings. They were everywhere.
One shop even boasted what were some of the biggest buns I've ever seen.
Even a few of the AKB48 members have dined and snacked at some of these restaurants and food stalls, too.
Remember that variety show episode where Yukirin's former schoolteacher surprised her? Yeah, it was here.
As a Chinese person, I didn't feel like eating at a foreign Chinatown, especially when overseas in a place that's already locally culinary like Japan. So I left the area and went back to Aka-Renga Soko for, of all things, a giant burger. The difference is that it has a sizeable slice of avocado on it, keeping with the Hawaiian theme. Costly too, at 1400¥ for a lunch set.
Since there wasn't anything much else to do in Yokohama, I decided to spend rest of the day fulfilling shopping errands around Tokyo, going to places like Nakano, Shinjuku and Akihabara. Speaking of the latter, Akihabara really does look quite pretty at night, with all the lights and neon signs glowing.
Breakfast: Eggs
Canned coffee of the day: Dydo Blend (3/5)
No comments:
Post a Comment