Here's the skyline you'll see if you head out of Yokohama Station. Being one of the major stations on the Toyoko Line, you would think that there would be some impressive sights to see here. But there's nothing more than a couple of gigantic malls. M and I got lost walking around, looking for a way out. It got ridiculous after a while, we'd see a sign that indicated that we were on floor B1, yet after walking up two flights of stairs, we were still one floor beneath street level. It was like being in that fucked up episode of the Twilight Zone again.
Again, nothing impressive. M tells me that HK has a great skyline. Did I write this already in an earlier entry? I can't remember. It's late and I am tired from walking all day. In any case, this disappoints me. I expected the Tokyo sky to be blotted out by menacingly tall, grey blocks of concrete. No such luck though. More and more, I am thinking that I want to go to HK. M and Hinnie were telling me about places that I could go when I am there. Sounds like fun.
Welcome to Chinatown. They have this thing with gates here. Check this out. It's nice, but I almost got run over, standing in the middle of the road, taking this picture. It wouldn't have been worth it if I had been killed, but I didn't know that until afterwards.
Yet another gate. I was trying to keep track of the names, so that I could keep a tab on where we were at all times. I lost track after the second gate. Sadly, my Chinese is not much better than my Japanese.
This is worse than Starbucks. I was dumbstruck when I saw this. Images of too-cute teeney bopper chicks and flashing cellphone antennae passed before my eyes and my blood ran cold.
Fortunately, it wasn't like the BBT places back home. In fact, it wasn't even a BBT place. M told me that the Ten Ren's we see at home are anomalies, and that in Taiwan, this is actually a respectable tea shop. It just somehow got mangled in the transistion from the Orient to Canada. Something is always lost in the translation.
I was hungry after that little scare, and decided to try a steamed bun. They sell these all along the streets here. It's kind of like the ones we have back home, except they are huge and cost about $5 each. They taste ok, but not like we get back home. I just liked the novelty of walking and eating at the same time (it's considered rude here, but I do it anyway).
I saw another yam truck and though I was stuffed from that enormous bun, I couldn't resist getting a yam. I regretted it after the second bite, as I really couldn't force it down. M made me save it to eat later, but I just chucked it into the garbage when she wasn't looking. I hate to waste food but I hate carrying it around even more.
We came across this little place, which I took as a coffee shop, as we were exploring the streets. I walked right by, but M called me back and we went in to see. It turned out to be more than just a coffee shop, it was a tea house.
The Japanese lady greeted us and let us know that she studied English in the US a few years back. "Do you know Vermont?" she asked. "I went to school there for a few years."
We had a brief discussion about where we were from and what we were doing in Tokyo and she told us to order tea from the menu.
Once we had chosen, she brought out all this funky equipment for the tea. Two cups that looked like oversized thimbles, two big bowls, another cup full of crazy-looking wooden implements and two tea little pots. Back home, the only thing I needed for tea was a cup, but apparently, they knew something here that I didn't.
The lady quickly explained that someone would be with us shortly to show us how to make the tea. She would have gladly done it herself, but she was still in tea-training. I glanced over quickly at M, but she didn't appear to be as amused as I was, so I just nodded politely and tried not to laugh.
At the table was a machine that was just begging me to play with it. It was a horoscope dispensor and for 100JPY, it'd spit out a prediction for you. I wasn't going to waste the money, but after I discovered that both M and I were libras, I decided I would be getting twice my money's worth, so I slipped a coin into the slot and hoped for the best. Out popped a little plastic sphere. Inside the sphere was this.
M doing her little "camera smile". M's a funny girl. We can yammer away at each other all day and she will laugh and/or smile naturally and all's well. But the second you pull a camera, she transforms into some weird automaton and can offer no more than a forced robotic smirk. This means something, I'm sure, but I don't know what.
