Yokohama cupnoodle museum

Today is the first day of the Chinese new year, so we are spending the day in Yokohama as they have one of Japan's only Chinatowns. Getting here was a headache and a half.

We've done just about every train blunder in one morning. The trains here are incredibly convoluted and confusing to navigate. Some require IC cards, some require pasmo cards, some are private railways, and they all often exist under the one roof. For us to get to Yokohama we needed to get a pasmo card for the subway system and a suica card for the JR lines. Everything is in Japanese, and despite researching, when you're there and there's no english whatsoever... It sucks.

Plus, there are letters and numbers that mean different lines but are the same colour, so once we worked out the JR line we got the blue train like planned to realise, nope, wrong train! So backtrack we went and opted for a different colour train to get to the same place (and each colour has a different number for the station as it has its own rules and systems). Honestly... Give me Melbourne. Or Taipei in Taiwan. One card, one ticket style and system. Obviously Tokyo is a headache because the entire population of Australia lives here and needs to get around, but still! Headache.

In saying that, once you are on the train, everything is very smooth so long as you have the numbers. I'll get used to it in a few days, especially on days where it's just subway transfers, but my god, it's one thing to prepare for it and another to do it.

Once we got to Yokohama we had a lovely walk down to our reservation at the cupnoodles museum, where we made our own cup noodles and watched a very funny video on the history of cup noodles. The gallery with all the different kinds of noodles was awesome! We even recognised some from home! I'm very much looking forward to having a late night cup noodle snack sometime on the trip.Read more