Japan was such a magical experience, I can’t stop talking about it even if I tried! The memories may have been made 10 months ago, but it’s still as fresh as my mom’s pumpkin pie–and that’s fresh, man.
Previously on My First Experience in Japan, I shared just the tip of the iceberg: fancy toilets, navigating the railways, barreling through check points, getting lost in Tokyo for a few hours… It was a gong show. The best kind of gong show, really, because I’ll never forget how incredible the adventures were even with those frustrating and confusing moments that happened a lot of the time. What do you expect when five girls travel to a place they’ve never been? Lots of learning, that’s for sure!
So we arrived in Narita Airport on October 10th, 2018, for the sole purpose of discovering Japan and Korea–and the former was our first stop for ten days. So how did we spend the first one?
Well it started with me being super sick all night but began a swift recovery when the TS5 (TokyoSeoul5) gang went out in the way early morning to bring back little snacks from the convenient store. Rejuvenated from a miraculous tiny cup of a green tea latte, we set out to discover the whole new world at our doorstep called Yokohama, Japan!
Fun fact time: Yokohama is the second largest city in Japan by population and sits right on Tokyo Bay. This means there’s lots of rivers and boats nearby!
Of course the first thing one should do when living in a new area is to get local snacks, then explore. (In Japan, it’s rude to eat and drink things while walking, so sitting is the polite way to enjoy a good snack!) Even though we just had snacks from 7-Eleven, I wanted to experience it for myself since I was sick before. Apparently, or so we quickly discovered, convenient stores in Japan are the superior convenient stores of the world. Free wifi, super clean, the literal best snacks, and around every corner of the neighbourhood.
We pillaged the aisles and grabbed things we didn’t understand just to try them out later! Some of these things included chips that I first thought would be sour cream and onion but ended up being Seaweed flavour (imagine my shock), ramen noodles, and Oolong tea that I’ve permanently fallen in love with ever since.
Here’s a picture of some of the snacks, and our view of the neighbourhood, drinking my favourite Japanese coffee on the patio of our AirBnB eight stories high:
Okay so we snacked up and headed down the road toward the river, where we discovered a Ramen shop along the way and instantly stopped in for lunch. We had to point at pictures on the menu for an elder Japanese woman taking our order (the language barrier between English and Japanese is extreme in most parts of Japan. We later learned that pointing at pictures was the easiest way for us to order things.) The noodles, by the way, were saintly. I could taste how homemade it all was! I wish we went back several more times. Here’s what the ramen shop looked like on the outside versus the deliciousness within:
Afterward, we went down the river where we came across a breath-taking view of Yokohama’s skyline. That ferris wheel went immediately on our bucket list of things to do later, which you’ll definitely hear more about in future blog posts! We also found a group of locals paddleboarding down the river, so I’ll have to do that the next time I visit Yokohama!
Anyway, we came across so many adorable soda machines along our exploration that we took a photoshoot in front of some. Chelsey is a spectacular Japanese Soda Machine Model.
So, onward down the river! Little did we expect to find a towering mast appearing overhead, attached to a really cool-looking ship chilling in a pond by surrounding skyscrapers. It was such an odd sight, so we took a gander.
We learned (and also just now discovered as I Googled it haha), that the boat is called Nippon Maru and was built in 1930 for training Japanese naval cadets.
Here’s a funny story about our time with Nippon Maru, though. We couldn’t board the ship, but there were some locals who were maintaining and working on it as we walked around oo-ing and ah-ing. There was one older man standing at the very front tip of the ship, who looked down at me.
I guess in the moment I was so happy to be in Japan and breathing foreign air and discovering new, cool things that I kind of just shouted so he could hear me, “KONNICHIWA!” (which means “Good afternoon!” in Japanese.) He smiled so wide I think his eyes disappeared and he waved at me with both hands shouting back, “HI HI!” Ugh I just about died from how adorable our brief but loud conversation was, trying to address each other the best we knew how in our reciprocating languages. This is one of the fondest memories that will always stick with me about Yokohama!
For the rest of our first day exploring our surroundings in Yokohama, we discovered how to properly get through those gates in train stations that we just kinda blasted through the night before (we were confused, hungry and tired.) What you’re supposed to do is buy a “Suica” card, which looks like this:
And then you tap it on the gate’s terminal thing, which will remember where you checked in. Then you’ll come across another gate whenever you arrive at your destination and tap the terminal again when you exit, which processes the travel fare between your two check points and charges it from your Suica card. Evidently, five incredibly tired and confused foreigners did not know this and we just forced ourselves through the gate without paying (whoops.)
So on our first day exploring, we decided we should probably figure this whole subway traveling thing out even if it felt impossible. So we stood in front of these card stations in complete confusion, pressing buttons and such, until a very kind local approached us (which is probably the fourth or fifth time a local helped us find our way within the first 42 hours being in Japan.) She taught us how to use the card, how much to put on it, how to recharge it and so on, then she shared a little about her life and how she came to know English… She was awesome. Those little moments of kindness, where someone went out of their way in their normal day-to-day schedules to help foreigners with the best English they could muster–these moments of kindness are my first and lasting impressions of the Japanese people.
So we got our Suica cards but decided to save the subway adventures for tomorrow, and headed back to our AirBnB where we spent the entire rest of the day trying to figure out how our new home worked. It was like a smart house, with buttons for everything–little hidden levers for the window curtains, what the heck was a “shower room”, what do all the buttons do on the toilet (there was shouting), how to work the remote (we found funny shows and had no idea what they were saying but it was fantastic), and also the water heater device on the wall started talking in the middle of the night and to this day I still have no idea what it said and why, but it talked.
So that was our first day in Yokohama, a wonderful, magical “HI HI” from Japan if I do say so myself. The next day we would tackle the subway stations to one of the most famous locations of Japan: Shibuya. The battle to beat jet lag really starts there (and in the next post.)
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Signed,
Allison the Adventurer
