Yokohama Chinatown

The last stop for the day in Yokohama was at their Chinatown. It's currently Chinese New Year, so there are lots of lanterns and festivities happening and extra food stuff on sale.

We arrived at an ideal time just after 4.15pm or so, with the streets still a little quiet but bustling enough to have a vibe. By the time we ended up leaving, it was really starting to take off. The energy was good here, where you had the main streets with the temples and large eateries, and then all these little small streets with vendors and decorations you could traverse. It's apparently the oldest Chinatown in the world too which is cool. Also, no idea why, but everyone was obsessed with getting their palms read. There were palm readers everywhere, and the lines for some of them were hectic! Michael just cackled at the fact that all their sheets looked like Mickey Mouse's gloves. It really gave the woo woo of the palm reading that extra bit of credibility for him.

We weren't super hungry, but there were a few items I was really hoping to try that are Chinese new year specialties here. The first being pork pepper buns from Taiwan.

Pork pepper buns are a rare speciality that is mainly sold in Taipei (and they're even quite tough to get there) that consist of pork meat, spring onions, and gravy/soup base inside of a bread bun that's heated upside down in a very specific clay barrel. The one I had in 2018 is still one of the nicest things I've ever put in my mouth. So of course poor Yokohama's version wasn't going to live up to that, but it was still yum, and awesome to get the chance to have one again nearly 8 years later and share that moment with Michael!

Then we had these strawberry sticks, which, honestly, I thought were going to be sickly sweet and ick, but they were legitimately amazing! Turns out, it's actually fresh strawberries coated in a very light sugar toffee. They were so good.

Finally, we had to get the speciality panda buns. We got the chocolate and strawberry ones. They were nice, but very much there for the cuteness, not the wow factor of the flavour.

Luckily for us, after getting a taxi back to the train station, we had a very smooth trip back home. No wrong trains, no confusion, less than 1 minute waits per transfers... It all worked and we got home in like, half the time it took to get there. Michael is making a scrap notebook of all our random tickets and wrappers and bits and bobs, so we ducked into the Lawson's convenience on the way home so he could get some stationary to make it happen.

Overall, Yokohama was a very calm city. There was a sense of quiet about it that was nice to ease our way into Tokyo (apart from the train conundrums), and it was lovely weather wise. Winter here in Tokyo is way nicer than Melbourne. You can rely on the weatherman for one, but it's also a nice cold that feels good on the skin, rather than like you're being slapped with Antarctica's farts every five seconds. So we don't have to rug up anywhere near as much for the exact same degree amount. Love that for us.

Alas, it's been a long day, and I'm pretty exhausted after stressing myself out over trains and doing 18.5k steps, so will most likely skip dinner or have something very local and very light. Plus, it's an early one for us, as we have to be up at the crack of dawn for a massive day at Disney tomorrow!Read more