Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Yokohama

A coworker has a coffee mug from Yokohama. I had asked her about the city and she told me great things! Yokohama is a city about 30 minutes south of Tokyo (2.5 hours by bullet train from Sendai). I decided to take a Monday off and spend a 3 day weekend there with my friend Mallory! I can't explain, but I fell in love with the city! I had a great time, here are some highlights:

Yokohama at night. The ferris wheel is a big landmark!

Inside the ferris wheel. It was kind of scary! It takes 15 minutes to go all the way around,
but it has some great views. I was really glad we wnet at night.

Not sure if you have ever heard of a Cat Cafe, but Japan is known for having them. Basically it is a place where you can go to play with cats, becasue most people live in apartments and cannot have animals. I had heard of these from a friend, but that was about it. It turns out there was a Cat Cafe right next to our hostel in Yokohama. Mallory loves cats, so she was really excited to go. I am not much of an animal person, but I knew I had to check out this strange place! Below is the door walking into the Cat Cafe!

The cafe is seperated into 2 rooms. One room is for food and drink (no cats allowed) and the other room is for playing with cats (no food/drink allowed). You buy a time limit and you can divide your time between the 2 rooms however you like. Below is a picture of the "Cat Staff" so you can learn the cats names/facts before you play with them.
The cat room. Yes, I realize this is totally bizzare!
There were about 20 cats in this room.

Japan is known for their crazy flavors of KitKat bars! These are sweet potato flavor,
I tried them...they were good!

We went to the big red brick warehouse. There are 2 huge warehouses that used to be for import & export, but now are used for shopping and dining. We ran smack dab into an anime convention! So funny, and so Japanese! We had to get a picture with some of them.

Yokohama also has a really large Chinatown. This is the entrance.
We bought Starbucks mugs!
This was a HUGE highlight of the trip: MEXICAN FOOD! It is hard/near impossible to find mexican food, much less GOOD mexican food and this place was top notch. Not to mention normal sized portions!