Day 15: Journey to Yokohama, Chinatown, Motomachi, Halloween
Day 15: Journey to Yokohama, Chinatown, Motomachi, Halloween
31 October 2018
Since we were basically all packed we strolled at a fairly leisurely pace down to make the most of the hotel buffet breakfast before the last of our major train journeys down to Yokohama. The usual bucket of coffee and several hundredwight of commestibles set us up nicely for the day and so, after saying さよなら to the Fujihashis (who were off to Tōshō-gū later), we checked out and waited for the shuttle bus into town, worried that we might miss our train. We really needn't have worried.
Once we were ready to go we got waved off by some of the staff and then before we headed in to town the shuttlebus first visited a hotel on the other side of the main road called Hotel Euro City...where it was met by a teenage lad who was one of the staff who had just waved us off! Presumably both hotels are owned by the same people and he can run like the wind - or he has a doppleganger! Probably the former. Probably.
Soon we were headed into Nikko where our receptionist/driver insisted on dropping us off at the correct station even though it's only a few minutes walk from the private railway station to the main Nikko line. Once we'd thanked him for looking after us and he'd disappeared we realised that actually we could have done with the walk to fill the time. We thought it would have taken longer than the 5 minutes it took to get from the hotel to town so we had the best part of an hour to kill. As yesterday, there wasn't much open at just gone 9am and we were dragging cases today. After 15 minutes of mooching about we binned the idea and decided to just go and wait for the train at the station.
it wasn't too bad though. Got a bit more practice in sorting the tickets for both the train to Utsunomiya and the Shinkansen to Yokohama. And soon after asking about the Imperial Suite. Does the Emperor come here often then? No - no he doesn't. Still, if he changes his mind it's all ready for him.
Not much to report about the journey; Nikko to Utsunomiya by the same retro local train, a brief wait for the Shinkasen to Tokyo Eki, change to the standard train network to get to Yokohama station and change to the local line to get to Kannai station (the nearest station to our hotel according to Google Maps - for once correctly).
Well, ok, we did have a medium strength divorce when Tracey had to carry her case down the steps at Yokohama and had, and I quote, "enough of dragging this ****ing case around". (Mostly because last year we Takkyubin'ed her case around Tokyo so I was dragging the remaining case about. Never mind Princess - nearly there now!)
Once we'd arrived at Kannai station we had a bit of a walk (5-10 minutes if that) to get to our hotel. To slight grumbling accompaniment by a marginally stompy person. Thank god we didn't have any detours down the wrong road or similar - I think there might have been lying on the ground, kicking and screaming if we had.
Greeted at reception (on the third floor - still can't get used to that) by Fujimoto San who confirmed our booking but politely informed us that we couldn't actually check in until 2pm. That's ok, we knew that. But much to Tracey's relief she took our cases into safe keeping until our return; the constant low-level background noise we'd heard all the way from the station suddenly stopped.
Happily now case free and with an hour or so to kill, we headed back the way we'd come and towards Yokohama's famous Chinatown, as recommended by Yuka. Bit of a hike (20 minutes?) but we hadn't done much walking today so not a problem. And we got to at least walk past Yokohama Baseball Stadium "Home of the Yokohama DeNA BayStars" on the way. Would have been nice to able to see a game even though we know zero about baseball, but it was the off-season and anyway there was a lot of building work going on. Maybe next time...
Having only ever been to Chinatown in London we were expecting a similar setup here; a main street and a few surrounding streets.
Erm, no.
Chinatown, Yokohama, is on a different scale entirely. Makes sense due to the geographical proximity of course, but it was still a bit of a "Woah!" moment when we saw it stretching off far into the distance. Since we blatently needed to spend a lot more time here than we'd originally thought, we planned to return later, we settled just now for a quick look round the immediate area, had a coffee or two in one of the cafés and then headed back to the hotel to check-in.
Welcomed back by Ms Fujimoto and her team, we checked in, got an extra key, found out that our bags had already been taken up and then spent an hour or so sorting ourselves out. Although there wasn't a hell of a lot to do since we were only staying two nights and would be off to the airport immediately after check-out. Mostly just reorganising the heavy items to even out the weight.
We'd learnt our lesson after last time and had our dirty laundry in compression bags in a rucksack and spare hold-all in the suitcases just in case. That way if we went over our 23Kg allowance we could just take out two prepacked bags and check them in separately. No repacking at the check-in desk for us! (Turned out in the end that we needn't have bothered but better safe than sorry!)
Oh, yes, the airport. Right, time to dig out that appalling Japanese again Mr Rowe and see if you can get reception to book us a taxi.
Not for the first time on this trip, a hotel reception team smiled politely as a Scottish numpty hoved into view and then had to concentrate furiously to comprehend the stream of gibberish emanating from his rabid gums. Is that Japanese? Has he had some sort of episode? Something about "the day after tomorrow" and "taxi" was that?
But to be fair to Ms Fujimoto she got another member of the team to make the call to a local taxi company while she worked through the details or which airport, which terminal (「国際」- "International" - not getting caught like that again) and what time we would like the taxi. A small but slightly heated discussion between the blathering idiot and his obviously long-suffering wife followed this last request. Would 6am be early enough for a 9:45am flight? Of course it would be - it's only 20-30 minutes to Haneda at that time of the morning. She must have though we had lost control of our faculties when we decided to actually book it for 5:30am! After last year, discretion seemed the better part of valour. No-one (visibly) batted an eyelid though and the taxi was duly confirmed by the member of staff (whose name I didn't write down, sorry).
Mentally polishing my halo for having destroyed several more people's faith in the sanity of foreigners, or at least babbling Scottish ones, we left the team to recover from the linguistic Rubik's cube they'd had no choice but to solve at short notice and headed, via a deliberately more circuitous route this time, back towards Chinatown.
We wombled about the maze of streets for quite a while but since it was still early and everything still seemed to be "warming up" for the evening we crossed the river just outside the boundary to find out what else was around. And what was around was the massive shopping street of Motomachi. Where it was Halloween.
Sorry, let's rephrase that. It was October 31. Everywhere it was Halloween.
But in Motomachi it was...
Halloween!
There were thousands of families with kids of every age group, all holding balloons and creating a sea of orange as far as the eye could see. Most of the shops were handing out free sweets to the patiently waiting queues.
And the thing that (as jaded Brits of a certain age) amazed us was that there were queues and everyone was patient. I'm slightly ashamed to reckon that if this had been the UK there would have been a recreation of the London riots at every shop. Here? Not a murmour. Not even in the queues for some of the more popular shops that stretched for hundred of yards. That is not a word of exaggeration. Hundreds of yards.
The parade and crowds carried on across the street in the rest of Motomachi. That's one long shopping street and one hell of a lot of families!
You can tell it's an upmarket shopping district when someone uses a real old MG as part of the theming!
Even the local post office staff got properly costumed up...
...as did the furry members of the local community...
Despite the insane levels of cuteness however, a shoe shop is still a shoe shop. Tracey nearly bought these but they were quite expensive and the thought of chucking over a hundred quid at shoes at the last part of our holiday eventually convinced her otherwise. Shame really; they were very nice.
Reading the events schedule, we missed the Dog Halloween parade by a few days. Probably just as well. Tracey might have tried to kidnap a few and smuggle them home in one of the cases.
To be fair, some of the costumes were scarier than others. Although I think this was supposed to be fun, this one scared the living poop out of us...
Still very conflicted with the whole "Dogs and cats in Pet Stores" thing. I know they are expensive so they are probably very well looked after, especially as puppies and kittens, but given the number of them having to be killed in rescue shelters every year, not sure they are as well cared for long-term once they go home and grow up...
After we'd walked the length of Motomachi (did I mention it's a long street!) a couple of times, the parade was starting to wind down as it got dark, so we crossed the river again and back into Chinatown, which was now starting to light and liven up properly for the evening. Lots of families obviously had the same idea as the orange ballons and queues outside shops were very evident here by this time.
Did spot this above the rows of shops. Certainly a bit of a change from the more prevalent dog and cat cafés. And I did have a bit of a geek revelation; ハリネズミ (Hedgehog) literally means "Needle Mouse". Which was the original working title for Sonic the Hedgehog. Always wondered why and it suddenly all made sense. Yes I know I should have known that but "Hedgehog" hadn't appeared on the JLPT vocabulary lists so far...
The shops weren't just giving sweets to children either. This is Tracey's genuine reaction to being given a handful of sweeties by the guy on the right. How many times have I told her not to accept things from strangers?
We did spend quite a bit of time in Chinatown, wombling around the back streets, poking into shops and buying some souvenirs. We even found the local temple which was quite impressive. But despite the massive amount of restaurants in the place, we couldn't find anything that we particularly fancied. Maybe it was that the people outside most of them were quite pushy trying to attract customers and we'd been put off by the first place in Hakodate. Maybe it was just analysis paralysis and the choice just overwhelmed us. Still not sure - perhaps we should have just sucked it up and picked one.
In the end we gave up trying to find anything in Chinatown (yes I know that's ridiculous!) and walked back towards the area around our hotel, trying to spot something suitable.
And we did!
Nothing like going up market, but one of the restaurant types we'd not visited last year was the "Ticket Ramen" type. Basically get a seat, go choose and pay for your food and drink at the ticket machine, then give the tickets to the staff and they bring it to your table.
Always up for a new experience we went for it and it was great! The waitress was really friendly and the machine wasn't too hard to use. Well, ok, we did cop out into the English option after going round in circles sorting the beer for Tracey but we'd have figured it out eventually. By this time we were starving though so we cut to the chase. And the food was genuinely really nice and stupidly cheap. Thoroughly recommended. Tracey even went up and ordered herself another beer unaided, so that's a definite seal of approval and endorsement that the system works just fine for non-Japanese speakers.
Stuffed with food and drink we toured around the back streets, roughly heading in the direction of the hotel, primarily to find a restaurant for tomorrow night. Nothing at all wrong with the ticket restaurant but last year the final meal in the Okonomiyaki restaurant in Tsukijima was really memorable so we were looking for something similar to round off the trip.
Much much trundling about later and we did find a suitable place so we took a photo of it so we could find it again tomorrow. That was a bit belt and braces though as it was a long but straight walk up the road immediately round the corner from the place in which we'd just eaten. I was sure I could find it again without the tech...
Plans sorted for tomorrow night then, we headed back towards the bright lights of the main shopping area looking for a Don Quiote to buy some Kit Kats and similar as more souvenirs. Tracey was not convinced I could find one. But I did. Because I am amazingly psychic, had memorised the area map and have a secret homing....ok I got lucky and spotted the sign on the corner before she did.
Yes they had Kit Kats. Yes ones you can't get in the UK apart from at great expense from specialist shops. I swear you could probably finance half your trip costs by filling a suitcase with them and bringing them home to sell on for the black market.
Only slightly joking.
Feet starting to moan a bit by now, we finished checking out the shopping street that paralleled our hotel's then tracked round the corner and back "home". No we didn't go for KFC's Halloween Limited Edition 9 Piece Bucket on the way, but it does show you that KFC in Japan is not just for Christmas.
We did stop off at the Family Mart across from our hotel to buy another bottle of sake and some snacks though. Bet you couldn't have predicted that. And yes that is a 7-11 right next door to our hotel but they didn't have any Junmai sake so we had to walk at least 30 yards to find an alternative conbini. I did say that ordinarily you could throw a rock in any direction and hit one.
Overview
Hotel
Food
- Excellent Hotel Breakfast
- Vending Machine Coffee
- Coffee and Iced Coffee
- Ramen and Katsu Curry
- Beer and Grapefruit Sour
- Sake and Snacks
Overview
Food
- Excellent Hotel Breakfast
- Vending Machine Coffee
- Coffee and Iced Coffee
- Ramen and Katsu Curry
- Beer and Grapefruit Sour
- Sake and Snacks