Day 12 Rain Rain Go Away

Fun fact, I forgot to pack an umbrella. Silly I know, seeing as how I knew I was coming to a country where June is their rainy season. I also refuse to buy one of those frilly, lacy things that Japanese women call umbrellas for the ungodly sum of 900 yen (roughly $7.25). Secretly I love those umbrellas, I just don't want to haul it home. But our hotel will let you borrow a very nice umbrella whenever you want. Thanks Intercontinental! That's a very nice perk when the weather has looked like this for the last 2 days:

Love being up in the clouds

Obviously the answer to more rain is more shopping and more sushi! But this time the good sushi.

Chutoro, fatty salmon (salmon with blow-torch crisped skin drizzled with mayo and green onions), and unagi (freshwater eel, blow-torch caramelized sauce)

Poop emoji book in Japanese

Hair drying glove?

Ear pick? At least it has cute animals on the top.

Adorable miniature animal containers to carry your sauces to and fro

For dinner, Ethan and I decided to head out to the Ramen Museum to try different types of famous ramen from around the country. They have 9 different ramen restaurants that are scattered around a replica street from 1958 Japan. That was the year that the first instant ramen was invented. Now their website advertises that there are sample size bowls available to allow the guest to try many different types of the noodle dish. What I thought would be a couple bites of noodles, and maybe a 1/2 cup of broth, was in fact a very nearly full sized bowl of ramen. I guess the prices reflect the bigger than anticipated size of the food, but they were again more than I was expecting. Each bowl was 550 - 800 yen. So not terrible pricing, but the price coupled with the size of the bowls was pretty prohibitive in trying the many many types of ramen. Between E and I, we were able to share 4 bowls of the sample size and one giant gyoza each. We would have loved to try more, but we were literally stuffed!

Salt broth with pork. This shop, Shina Soba-ya, uses a special wheat flour to make their noodles. And the chicken that is used to make the broth are raised by the shop master himself. There are over 30 ingredients, all specially sourced, to make this ramen special.

Same shop as above, but the soy broth also with pork, This was both E and my favorite from this shop.

Sumire ramen. This shop has been called the most famous miso shop in Japan. They specialize in a rich, miso broth and have Hokkaido style noodles which are slightly thick and curvy.

Sumire again, but with a soy (maybe soy and miso?) broth. This was my favorite! It was so rich and satisfyingly salty, lol.

HUGE gyoza. See my phone in the upper right for comparison.

Day 10 Sankeien Gardens in the Daylight

Last Friday, E and I spent the evening biking through the heart of Yokohama to a beautiful Japanese Garden where we watched fireflies light up a little valley. I thought it was beautiful and peaceful, but if I'm going to be honest, I was underwhelmed with the amount of fireflies. But I went back to the Sankeien Gardens to see the park in the daylight. While I was there, I got a little firefly education from an awesome park guide.

He told me that there are 2 main types of fireflies here in Japan, the Genji and Heike. They are thought to be named after 2 warring clans from 1185.  I guess it's appropriate that the Genji variety are larger, and brighter, because they won the war. It's folklore that the souls of the samurai that fell in battle inhabit the fireflies. Children are taught to not catch or hurt the bugs out of respect for the samurai souls. 

I was also told that firefly larvae need clean river beds or rice paddies with mineral rich water to grow. Because of the increasing water pollution here in Japan, it is becoming increasingly rare to see these beautiful creatures in their natural habitats, especially near urban areas. In fact, there's a firefly nursery in Tokyo that has created a greenhouse complete with an artificial stream to breed fireflies, and so people can enjoy them indoors. Knowing that it's rare to see these little critters where were are, I feel privileged to have seen any at all!

The park is so much bigger in the daylight! They had so much of it blocked off for the firefly night, that it probably only took us 15 - 20 minutes to walk through the whole thing. It took me almost 3 hours to take everything in today! The guide recommended an hour for both the inner and outer gardens, but I took my time and a couple breaks (it was really hot!). The original garden was fairly sparse, but since the war they've been planting trees and now it looks like a forest. Most of the buildings are not original. They were moved here throughout the last century. A lot of the original buildings were destroyed during the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 or World War II.

Lotus flowers

These are a variety of hydrangea and are the prettiest baby blue color

Example of a building's foundation that was destroyed in the Kanto Earthquake

Absolutely an urban oasis

Creeping apricot trees. The branches are supported by crutches.

Where the fireflies come out to play

Japanese farmhouses built in 1735 were not designed for 5'9" women.

Steps? Try a near vertical ladder without rungs. Damn these were steep.

The farmhouse. The steps led up to the attic. 

Three story pagoda, built in 735. What?!? Moved from Kyoto in 1914. That's so old I can't even fathom it. Homer (the poet, not the Simpson) was alive in 730.

You know after walking around in the heat for 3 hours, I WAS HUNGRY! Lunch was:d

Corndog! Loved the convenient ketchup/mustard duo.

Then for dinner we hit up some kaiten (conveyor belt) sushi for an appetizer.

Sushi appetizer. These are our favorites so far. Fatty tuna, tuna roll, and fatty salmon. Guess we're just a bunch of fatties! But they're sooo yummy!

Then we headed next door to Ippudo which is indeed a chain restaurant, but consistently serves some of the best ramen in Tokyo. They only have 3 things on the menu, but they do those 3 things extremely well (not including sides and a seasonal special). The gyoza are to die for and the noodles are cooked perfectly in a rich, but not too rich broth. I've now been here twice and still want more!

Spicy pork ramen from Ippudo, one of the best ramen shops in Tokyo

Garlic pork ramen

Tsukemen and McDonalds

What is tsukemen you ask? It's like ramen in the sense that it's noodles and a broth, but instead of being served in the same bowl like soup, they're served in separate bowls. And the noodles are cold. I've heard it explained as summer's answer to ramen since only the broth is hot. You're supposed to dip your cold noodles into the hot, strongly flavored broth, then eat! Super duper delicious.  E tried the "regular" tsukemen, noodles served with a pork based broth with baby bamboo shoots and slices of pork. I tried the spicy version of that and added a soft boiled egg. Both were yummy, but I definitely liked my spicy soup better. Best part of dinner was when our broth got chilled from dipping the cold noodles into it, our waiter brought out hot stones to add to the broth. Very yummy, but I need to learn how to eat ramen without slurping the broth all over the front of my shirt! Bib please!

After dinner we had a little fun in the Pokemon Center.

Moomin Bubble Tea! Idk what Moomin are, but they're cute!

Curvy escalator delivering me to Pikachu!

 Penny press. But they don't have pennies here. So you put your yen in and they use a blank copper round to press your "penny."

What Pokemon is this? I can't handle all the fluffy cute!

Fast forward to Thursday night, and I got hangry. That's hungry-angry for those not in the know. I walked about 12,000 steps, or 5 miles before lunch time. And I got dehydrated. And I got a little sunburned. And there may or may not have been an earthquake cuz I got really dizzy then crashed for about an hour (probably not a real earthquake, probably just overheated dehydration). I woke up to Ethan coming back to the hotel from work and I had no dinner plan. And I was hangry. I really wasn't feeling walking around for a half hour scouting out food, so we had McDonald's for dinner. However, the only thing familiar about dinner were the french fries. We ordered the 4 sandwiches that aren't offered in the US. We ate a tonkatsu burger (fried pork cutlet, topped with a sweet thick soy sauce, and shredded cabbage), teriyaki burger (pork patty with a teriyaki and lemon-mayo sauce), filet-o-ebi (fried shrimp patty), and the veggie chicken burger (ground chicken with corn, carrots, and soy beans with a French dressing-like sauce). Sorry McDonald's Japan, none of these things were very good. I did like the veggie chicken burger, but the sauce was just waaaayyy too sweet for my tastes. For the record, McDonald's fries are the same in Japan as they are in the US. We chose the weird drink option too. Qoo it was called. I thought it tasted like someone put apple juice in lemonade, but according to the McD's website it's actually a white grape juice?

Anywho, snacks were also weird today. We sampled some kit-kats. The only flavor I know we had was a matcha covered red bean paste kit-kat ball. Don't judge. Our soda was oddly flat. It was carbonated, but like Pepsi that has been sitting in the fridge for a couple days. It tasted like coconut sprite? Who knows what the other kit-kat flavor was. We literally have no clue.