Yokohama

After walking around Shibuya a bit to explore I traveled to Yokohama for my next hotel. It's about an hour or so away from Tokyo, probably the same travel time as Narita Airport to Tokyo proper. It was raining pretty hard but there were roofed walkways to my hotel because it was part of a huge mall. It was kind of interesting to feel like you're staying right above the mall and everything's just right there. Got to try out a fluffy pancake in Japan and it was great.

I splurged for this very fancy hotel but it only came out to be less than a hundred dollars a night; they used Wacom Cintiqs for their hotel document signing. Talk about overkill. There were attendants at the lobby just there to assist people and that was super helpful. The hotel was also a huge landmark and I could spot it from most of the places I was at.

My reason for going to Yokohama was to see this moving Gundam and it was incredible. They took the whole thing down since then as it was supposed to only be up for a few years. There was a letter from the creator apologizing for not having a fully functioning Gundam that could walk around.

There were maybe 50 people in my group going up. You had to pay extra to go up. There was a 2nd floor and a 3rd floor to its head. I got super lucky that the Gundam moved its head towards me when it was my turn! It does this action sequence with audio from the anime. It gets down on its knee and stuff like that. This video was a quick edit I made at a cafe the day after. It does completely different poses and actions so it's not the same everytime.

I walked along the ocean and there were a ton of very fancy knick knack shops at the Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse. I then walked over to Chinatown and kind of got there too late for the gyoza restaurant I wanted to go to.

The Chinatown was very busy. All the nice restaurants looked to be full and almost every restaurant had an open window selling street food but they all sold the exact same things. Dumplings and fried squid. I went and got my fried squid at a shop that seemed to be largely ignored. I was surprised I ate this greasy thing and didn't get any stomach issues afterwards. In fact I never got any stomach issues in Japan despite the low amount of leafy vegetables and high amount of fried foods. I never felt bloated or heavy.

In the morning I discovered that it was very difficult to find Japanese breakfast especially at a luxury mall. Seemed like the only options were French pastries and the convenience store prepackaged foods and it seemed like most Japanese people did the latter. Now that I think about it, I didn't even check to see if I could eat the hotel but I kind of just wanted to experience the restaurants and avoid Western food while in Japan for my first time.

The hotel had a photograph where it labeled Mount Fuji on it but I don't think I could tell if I could see it? Maybe it was the fog or clouds obstructing the view. The second photo here is my own photo of the view that morning.

Next on the list was a daytrip out to Enoshima and Kamakura before I travel back to check in to my next hotel. I stuck all my stuff in a locker at the train station and went out to the beach.

Day trip to Enoshima Island and Kamakura