Yokohama ni Yokoso

We're going to Disneyland Tokyo tomorrow, which means I need to try and get enough sleep tonight, which means the post will probably be short. I'm sure you'll all manage.

We spent the morning in our hotel room, largely because I had a bad sore throat and needed to vegetate for a while. The sore throat hasn't gone away, but it has faded over the course of the day, so I do hope it doesn't erupt into anything worse. I've discovered that hot, humid weather is actually fairly pleasant when you're not feeling well!

We went to Yokohama (the post title means 'welcome to Yokohama'). This is the second time we've taken a field trip there. This time we went to Chinatown with my sister. It is possible to tell the difference between Japantown (i.e. everything) and Chinatown, but it admittedly takes a trained eye. I'm told the main trick is that in Chinatown, everything is red, that being a lucky color in China, and of course Chinese text looks a little bit different (but you sort of have to know Japanese to notice this). Yokohama's Chinatown is the largest in Japan, and for this reason Yokohama has great Chinese food. We didn't avail ourselves of this, however--no, we had something else in mind.

The idea was to take my sister's host family out to dinner at a shabu shabu restaurant, but apparently Nathan didn't hang onto the check tightly enough and the dad stole it from us when he wasn't looking. So, in fact, we were treated to dinner by said host family (on the understanding that we'd return the favor if they were ever in the U.S. ... which we would). Shabu shabu is a 'boil it yourself' buffet. You have a divided pot with water on one side and something like soy milk on the other, both of them boiling. You have very thinly sliced bits of pork and beef, which you pick up with your chopsticks and dump in the boiling water. I think "shabu shabu" is the sloshing sound from rolling meat around in the water. The meat only takes a few seconds to cook, so you can stuff yourself pretty effectively. There's also a wide selection of vegetables and noodles available for boiling, and it was really delicious. The hardest bit is trying to figure out how to get the grated carrot back out using nothing but chopsticks!

Although we were defeated on the bill-paying front, we managed to sneak in a box of See's candy which I brought along. I also had some packets of American money for Rin & Ren, the two kids. I have some photos with the family now, which I'll show off to anyone who asks--but probably not on the blog. Unfortunately, I think the family still wins on the hospitality front, because they then decided to drive us all the way back to Akihabara, which was terribly convenient for us and a longish drive for them. Thus defeated in the hospitality game, we plot revenge if they ever visit the states--maybe we can rent a limmo? ;-)

Tomorrow: Disneyland!