Yokohama - 20th - 22nd February

My papers are signed and I am officially leaving Japan and heading home this summer. There are still a few places that I want to visit before I leave. Yokohama was actually not one of them, but because I am leaving this year, I attended a conference for returning JETs that was held there. I won't go into detail about the conference, as it wasn't exactly the most stimulating thing I've ever attended, but I do want to tell you a few things that I managed to do in between times.

The conference centre was located one train stop from Yokohama station, so Todd and I decided to get a hotel around that next station. This meant the conference centre was in walking distance, as well as the other two attractions we wanted to go to. It also meant that we got a nice view over Minato Mirai (harbour of the future), especially at night.

View from our hotel room

As you can see in the photo, there is a large Ferris wheel in Yokohama. This is actually in the small 'theme park' in Yokohama called Cosmo World. The Ferris wheel used to be the world's highest clock, which sounds impressive but just turned out to mean that they stuck a digital clock on the side of it. Boring! Anyway, it's free to get in to Cosmo world, but costs to go on each ride/attraction. As it turns out, after walking around the park, nothing really took our fancy (we had already heard from people who attended the conference last year that the roller coaster wasn't really worth the money), so we skipped the park and went on to the main attraction (for me) in Yokohama - the Cup Noodles Museum!
 

Very excited about to go in!

The thing I was looking forward to the most here was that we could design and make our own pot noodle! It was a very easy process. First we bought our standard cup noodle cup, then we were led to an area with coloured pens where we could draw/colour our cups to our hearts content. After that we handed over our cups and watched as dried noodles were pushed in, then we could choose the flavour of the soup as well as four toppings. I panicked a bit with my toppings but I'm still very much looking forward to my crab, fishcake, cheese and spring onion pot! Then they sealed it and shrink wrapped it, and finally we could put it in the souvenir bag that we could inflate to keep the noodles safe. Very fun, and I was very happy with the finished product.

Drawing our designs

My cup!

Adding the ingredients

Toppings added (mine is bottom left)

Our finished cup in their bags

With the inventor of cup noodles.

Afterwards, we stopped off for a small lunch at their noodle bazaar which has different noodle dishes from six different countries. After just coming back from Vietnam, both Todd and I went for the pho option and it was really nice to revisit the taste of the Vietnamese dish. Then we had a really brief look around the museum before it was back out to another presentation at the conference (yes, this was done in an extended lunch break!).

That was definitely the highlight, and pretty much it for our adventure in Yokohama. The only other thing we did to note was the few restaurants we treated ourselves to. The first night we found a (rather expensive) British pub, so it was really nice to feel like home for a bit eating fish and chips, pate, and drinking pimms and lemonade! Lovely. The second night we gorged ourselves at Hard Rock Cafe which was obviously wonderful but way, way too much food. That's the problem with living in Tokushima, because there's no decent western restaurants around, we tend to go a bit crazy when we find some in another prefecture!

The Saturday we had tickets back to Tokushima around 5 so we had the whole day really to do some more exploring. However, we both felt that we had done enough in Yokohama, so we travelled over to Tokyo to do the thing I have been looking forward to the most since I found out about their existence - going to a squirrel park!
Now you may wonder what on earth a squirrel park is, and how it differs to parks with numerous squirrels at home. The main difference here is that these squirrels live in a large enclosure which you can go into to feed them. Being so used to this, the squirrels come right up to you, climbing up and jumping on you to get the food in your hand! Outside the main area there was a few enclosures with squirrels in them, and hundreds of rabbits and guinea pigs that you could also feed. However, we went through all that pretty quickly and made our way to the main area.

I was in heaven as soon as we walked in. There were squirrels everywhere. Knowing I wanted to feed the squirrels, we bought some food and were given an oven glove type glove to put on. No sooner had I poured some of the food (I think they were sunflower seeds or something similar) onto my glove, than the first squirrel has quickly run up my leg and was sitting happy on my hand eating the food. I was in shock, but not for long, as I realised that a mini dream of mine was coming true - I could actually hold and stroke (if I was careful) a squirrel!! I absolutely love squirrels so this was really an incredible experience and I had a grin from ear to ear from the moment we stepped in the door to quite a few hours afterwards. It was so much fun and I would highly recommend it to any squirrel lovers out there.

Pretty happy right now!

All the little colour boxes are squirrel houses and you could wander around the area

The park is called Machida Squirrel Park (Machida no risu koen/町だのりす園) and is easy to get to from Machida station in Tokyo. I have this blog http://wanderlust-japan.com/blog_page/squirrel-heaven-in-tokyo/ to thank for giving really easy directions to get to the park, without them it would have been a bit more difficult as there are no English directions on the official website. (http://www13.ocn.ne.jp/~risuen/)
It was great, and I'm still buzzing a little from it.

So all in all, it was a great trip, and flying back from Tokyo meant that I could stock up on my all important Tokyo Banana omiyage! Yum!