Yokohama is cool - especially the area we were based in, Minatomirai. The city was one of the original western settlements in Japan (I'm sure Bryn will come along behind me and correct me...I am just rattling off what I can remember of what he told me!) I also know this because I tried really, really hard to read Gaijin by James Clavell (it was loooong and excruciating and I just couldn't do it). Now Yokohama is home to tons of shopping, Japan's biggest China Town, as well as the tallest building in Japan.
On Saturday morning we caught an early shinkansen (bullet train) up to Yokohama and arrived around 10:30. We dropped our bag off at the hotel, then set off for China Town. My experiences in China Towns around the world have not been fantastic. The first was yeeeeaaaars ago in New York City where I think we ordered chicken soup and it came as a bowl of broth with like, a whole chicken floating in it - gross. The next one was just a few years ago with Bryn in Kobe. It snowed, and we were bullied up to the 7th floor and made to eat horrible "Chinese" food. Here's the blog entry from that trip! Yokohama's China Town was actually quite fun.
We had decided to pop into one of the many restaurants early to beat the lunch rush. All of the window displays looked about the same, as did the prices, so we just went into one and were immediately seated. The host then took away the menus on the table, and came back with a different one with crazy-high prices! Bryn and I looked at each other, put our coats on and left! Down the street a bit we found another restaurant which had nice, AFFORDABLE looking lunch sets and had a yummy lunch in there.
We wandered around some more, had a pick-me-up drink at Starbucks, then set off walking towards Motomachi - the swanky shopping district in Yokohama. We didn't buy anything, and eventually found ourselves at check-in time and went back to the hotel.
Before dinner that night we explored some of the shopping in the area around the hotel, then ate at "Bubby's New York Diner" - the burger was really good! (The shopping centers had lots of escalators...some looooong, some curved...crazy!)
The next day we started off with a Starbucks breakfast (sort of our tradition no matter where we go now) and caught a train to Shibuya in Tokyo, just a 30 minute ride away. Now I had one mission while in Tokyo that day: find macarons. I have been seeing macarons online and on TV shows forever and have been DYING to try one. In some of my down time at school before the trip (I have lots of downtime) I started doing some internet based research and discovered that two famous Parisian macaron shops have stores in Tokyo (This one and this one). I wrote down the locations of each store, and we set off to find them.
(I didn't take this picture...my pictures didn't turn out so well so I "borrowed" one from the internet!)We started our search in Ginza - the swanky shopping district of Tokyo. When we first arrived the huge streets were roaring with cars, but after wandering for a couple of hours (in search of the Mac store, which turned out to be right in front of us the whole time!) they closed the main road to traffic and put chairs and tables in the middle of the road! Kinda crazy, but pretty cool. We also discovered the first of the macaron shops there!
After Ginza we got on the train, and just hopped off at a random station and decided to take a walk by the Imperial Palace grounds. (That way we did something kind of cultural). It was kinda crazy to see the sky scrapers behind really old looking Japanese buildings though!
Then we went back to Shibuya to find another macaron shop. Shibuya is insane - there is just no other way to describe it. I don't think I have ever seen as many people in my entire life (Mom and Prad - you should recognize some of these places!)
We got our second batch of macarons, then were off to Harajuku, where we wanted to have Bryn's birthday dinner. We got lucky and caught a glimpse of some of the freaks who hang out in that area, but were unlucky in discovering that the building with the restaurant Bryn wanted to eat in had been knocked down (talk about bad luck!).
We were exhausted by this point, so we headed back to Yokohama and had dinner at the TGI Fridays we had discovered near the hotel. When we made it back to the hotel I tried the macarons from Laduree...nice, but seemed a little overrated. I ate the macarons from Pierre Herme the following evening...
OH MY GOD SOOOOOO GOOD!!!!! Next time you happen to find yourself in Paris, I'm telling you, HAVE to have a macaron from Pierre Herme.
The next three days were a blur of shopping (We must have gone into H&M 10 times!) and my meetings. It was fantastic to have a little change of scenery and eat every kind of western food we came across. Hearing about the earthquake in Christchurch on Tuesday was a downer, but we were very relieved to hear that our friends and Bryn's family were safe.
This was where my conference was...pretty impressive, huh?!?Well, that's my take of our mini-vacation (slash conference for me). Maybe you can convince Bryn to tell his version too for some more quality reading!
