Mike's Birthday in Yokohama

It's Mike's Birthday!
Last night our new favorite people (the same crew that took us out on Tuesday), took us to a Korean BBQ place close to the factory where they all work.  It was really good, but had SO MUCH FOOD! There were little grills right there on your table where you could grill your food, which was pretty cool.  Although we learned some chopsticks etiquette after making some crucial mistakes:

1. Never have two people moving one thing with their chopsticks at the same time...it's what happens at funerals. 
2. No stabbing things with your chopsticks.
3. No pointing at people with your chopsticks. 
4. Never leave chopsticks sticking up from a bowl of rice (again, something to do with honoring the dead). 
5. Also, we had to have separate chopsticks for the raw meat and then for the cooked meat (this made perfect sense!).

It was a lot to keep straight, but worth it, and I'm glad someone clued us in! Who knows how many people we've offended so far!  The food was fantastic. We had 3 different kinds of beef, pork, the biggest hot dog I have ever seen, boiled garlic, 2 different kinds of sausages, rice, three kinds of noodle soup, a kind of rice soup, and then for dessert they brought out this plate of fruit and sorbet.  

 Giant hot dog:  It was longer than my arm...see the standard sized bun in the middle?

Dessert!

I also encountered my first Japanese style toilet, which involves squatting over it...I have been doing my very best to avoid these and had thus far succeeded, but after 3 beers I had no other choice.  Luckily everything ended up where it was supposed to, but I was very confused... do you back in? Do you face it? I felt like there should have been a manual for dumb foreigners like me! I asked Mike's co-workers and they informed me that you face it, which is what I ended up doing.  Thank goodness.


After eating so much food I thought I might explode, we took the train back home. When we got to our stop, we came across the police holding up traffic, it looked like a pedestrian had been hit or something.  Luckily by the time we got there everything was gone, just the police doing some CSI type stuff.  A good reminder to pay attention when crossing those streets!

After sleeping in Saturday morning (I was up late reading a scary book...dumb!), we woke up to find that not only is Katie Holmes divorcing Tom Cruise (thank Xenu), but Adele is pregnant! So much celebrity news!  Mike wasn't as excited...but he was excited that we were going to head to Yokohama for his birthday.  It's only a half hour train ride away, so it wasn't too bad getting there. We stopped to get an iced coffee for me, since the instant coffee we have here doesn't quite give me the jolt I need for days full of walking, and I was delighted to see that they have my new favorite treat here: a baked sweet potato! It's so delicious.  Then we picked up an English map from the tourist information center in the station and mapped out our day.

Yokohama is the second biggest city in Japan, but it didn't feel like it.  The streets weren't nearly as crowded, and everything seemed to move a little slower, which was nice.  For once we were going faster than everyone instead of being the clumsy giants clogging the sidewalk traffic.  We figured that we'd start at Nissan Global Headquarters, since Mike had been there before and wanted to show me that it was better than Toyota's.  He was right!   Plus they were giving away free instant iced coffee from Starbucks, but you had to wait in a really long line to fill up the glass that they gave you with water and ice, so we decided to just toss the cups and take the via for later.  

 This lady was giving a demonstration about how big the inside of this van was:

 Free coffee!

 Cute kids play area:

 Mike...not sure what this look is, but he's clearly thinking something deep, a year older a year wiser??

 Juke!

 THEY HAVE PINK LEATHER AS AN OPTION!!!

 You can't really see it, but I'm behind the wheel.

 Mike didn't quite fit...

 A demonstration on the Leaf:

 Mike found the minivans again:

 "Look!! 6 cupholders, and two are refrigerated!!!"

 Here's a line of hybrid sedans:

 Each car had these little touch screens next to them with information about the car:

 I think that price translates to about $75,000....yikes.

 I was really excited about this car name:

 Starbucks!

 The toilets here had a button to turn on sounds of toilets flushing, and two different kinds of bidets.  Plus the seats are heated.  Huge step up from last night's crouching tiger hidden dragon experience (ok, bad pun, but I had to do it!).

 Here's mike out on the porch where they had some more cars you could get into:

 This dog had it's own stroller:

 Some shots of the water:

 STYX!  Probably not the band...but I was still really excited.  Although, in hindsight, maybe they meant the river we were going over was like the river Styx? In which case, I'm not excited.

 The bridge was really low!

 This kid was adorable.  He was on a bike that didn't have pedals, he just waddled his cute little legs along to keep him going (along with some healthy pushes from his dad):

 We were waiting for the train and mike spotted this DragonBall Z soda, so of course he had to get it:

 It ended up being an orange flavored soda.  He was more excited than he appears in this picture!

Obviously our new favorite place:

After a quick subway ride from Nissan, we ended up in "Queen's Square", which was filled with shops and restaurants and was right next to Cosmo World, which has one of the largest ferris wheels in the world.  Mike didn't want to go up though (he's a little afraid of heights).

I loved this statue:

 Here was a street performer who seriously talked for like 5 minutes next to a unicycle.  I thought maybe his whole thing was that he just stood next to it the whole time.  I got bored so we moved on:

 According to my guidebook, this is (was?) the tallest building in Japan...it didn't look like it could be though, so I'm skeptical.  Guidebook Schmidebook I say.

Then we got to World Porters, which was a giant indoor mall with a movie theater and a ton of stores.  We left after 5 minutes...a popular thing to do here is to have people standing outside each shop yelling things about their specials...It was SO ANNOYING. I felt like my head was going to explode.

Then we got to the cupnoodles museum, but found out that they were closing right as we got there.  Shoot!  We'll have to go back, Mike was really sad:

  We headed along the waterfront and came to the red brick warehouses, which were built in the 1800's to work on ships in.  Now, they're full of shops and restaurants. 

 Here's the birthday boy!:

 This guy was walking around with this cat on his shoulder, like a parrot.  He wasn't even holding onto the cat! The cat was just hanging out! And he was pushing an empty stroller which I can only assume is for the cat when it gets sick of acting like a parrot.

 Here's some views from between the two red brick buildings:

 Japanese Navy Ship (sidenote, Mike saw a girl in her Navy Uniform which prompted him to start singing "In The Navy" very loudly.  I didn't get a picture because I was trying to pretend I wasn't with him, which is really hard since we were the only two white people around):

 I was trying to get a picture of the fish jumping out of the water, but failed.  It was crazy though, huge fish kept jumping really high out of the water!

 This is a couple, making out like CRAZY in the middle of the weeds.  Mike thought they were on bath salts, but they didn't appear to be actually eating each other's faces, just figuratively:

 Some shots of the city as the sun was setting, you can kind of see the ferris wheel in the middle there, to give you an idea of how far we'd walked:

 Here was an American or English guy singing and playing on his guitar...he got a lot of weird looks.  I think he thought he was John Lennon and maybe that's his Yoko sitting next to him?

  Eventually (after a lot of walking) we found the Osanbashi International Passenger Terminal, which was a really long pier that was just recently completed in 2002.  It's won some awards for how it's designed, and I think rightfully so.  Although odd at times, it was definitely interesting to see.  It seemed like if a giant ship and a boardwalk had a baby, this is what would result. 

We couldn't figure out why they had grass everywhere, but you couldn't sit on it! I guess it was just for show. 

 Lots of couples were hanging out here, and some were even having picnics.  It was pretty relaxing and there was a nice breeze coming off of the bay.

 It's us!

 Inside, there was a samurai store!

Afterwards, we headed down this lovely path of trees and flowers to Chinatown, which was really cool!  On the way, we found a Starbucks that had a mug for my friend Lindsey...finally! They have none in Tokyo, but they have one in Chinatown in Yokohama??? Very strange.

 One of the gates leading into Chinatown:

 There are over 300 restaurants within a 10 block radius.  We stopped at one and had some dinner, which was good, not great.  My book warned us to stay away from pricey tourist traps, so I think we were a little nervous in picking out a place, but we ended up going with one that had English on the menu (we kind of have to do that with our food allergies).  

 Here's a shrine:

 Here's Mike, waiting for me to get done taking pictures of the shrine:

 I loved the lanterns hanging over the street:

After we got done strolling through Chinatown, we got on the train to get back to Tokyo.  Mike wanted to finish out his birthday night with some beer and ice cream (which sounded great to me), so we stopped at the grocery store and now we're relaxing and indulging.  Tomorrow it's supposed to rain, so I think we're going to go to some museums...a Science Museum for Mike, and an Art Museum for me.  Perfect!