Day 9 Yokohama Chinatown

Today I was brave and took the subway all by myself! I can officially say that it was easy, I did not get lost, and I will do it again! It's a little intimidating trying to navigate a town when 75% of the signs are in Japanese.

I took the specialized Yokohama Baystars car to the stadium station.

The Baystars are Yokohoma's baseball team. 

Nautical subway art. I appreciate the depiction of the captian. It looks like a nose!

In general, the subway is much cleaner than other subways I've been on. NYC subway stations are filthy and smell like old pee and there are rats. Not so much here in Japan, everything is very tidy.

I was riding the subway to Yokohama's Chinatown. It has been around for about 150 years, and is the largest Chinatown in all of Japan and is one of the largest in the world.

Panda-monium was going in full force here. All the pandas were so cute, I wanted to bring it all home with me!

Panda toe socks! It was hard not to leave with these. However, they're Asian foot sized, so there's a 0% chance of them fitting my feet.

There were other cute things too.

These keychains were sooo fluffy and soft!

Cat store!

Dog necklace

Wittle piggies.

Then there's the food!

This vendor sold various types of pork dumplings. They were cheap and delicious!

This restaurant specialized in Peking Duck. This particular whole duck costs $65.

Sesame balls

Crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and filled with warm red bean paste. They're warm and sweet. Best sesame ball I ever had.

Rum raisin Kit-Kat

Wasabi Kit-Kat

Fresh Lychee fruit

Roasted Chesnuts

My lunch!

On Saturday I had some really yummy grilled eggplant. I told E, "I really want to find some place that serves a spicy eggplant dish. I don't know if it exists, but that's what I want to eat!" The food here has been good, but I'm overwhelmed by all the sweet things. It seems that everything has sugar in it! If you know me, you know that I like my spicy foods. In fact, I brought my own mini bottle of Frank's Red Hot sauce with me on this trip! Also, I've been having a hard time finding a dish that's abundant with veggies. They're stingy with any veggie that isn't cabbage or bean sprouts. 

As I was walking around Chinatown, I was keeping my eye out for anything that looked like eggplant on the visual menus (in front of almost every restaurant). I went down a little alleyway and Voila! something that resembled eggplant. I went in, sat down, and was handed a menu in Japanese and Chinese, no English, and no pictures. So i whipped out my translator app, and found out that nasu is the Japanese word for eggplant. When the waiter came round for my order, I asked if he spoke English, to which he shook his head. So I said "Nasu?" He kind of shrugged. I tried to get him to go outside with me so I could point to what I wanted. He refused. So I said "Nasu?" again. He went back in the kitchen, presumably to get a wooden spoon to shoo out the confused American. But he came back 10 minutes later with a plate full of delicious looking eggplant! I took one bite and was in heaven! I found spicy eggplant!! It was simply glorious. When I told E about how I ordered lunch, he was shocked that a) my sad attempt to order food actually worked and b) that I got exactly what I wanted by only using 1 word to order. I was pretty shocked myself, admittedly.

After lunch I wandered around the various stores and found 2 beautiful shrines.

For dinner we had tonkatsu. Basically it's fried pork. I had poin loin, and E had cutlets. We both had fried prawns. The meal is typically served with shredded cabbage, rice and miso soup. Our miso soup had tiny little mussels swimming in the bottom of our bowls (not actually swimming, just flavoring the broth). They were about the size of a fingernail.

Beverage of the day was a melon cream soda. Not bad, but probably won't miss this back in the states either.