Yokohama

Today, Sunday the 14th of February 2010: St Valentine's day AND the Chinese New Year, I decided to go visit Yokohama, Japan's second largest city. And it turns out it wasn't actually as crowded as it might have been.

Yokohama's main train station is right down town near the docks. For lack of space, they have a very nice commercial center below the train station. Today it was packed with stalls selling chocolate as in Japan, St Valentine's day is for women to give chocolate to men. They have the White day a month later for men to give presents to women. As well as the chocolate it was also the last day of the winter sales, but there wasn't really any shopping frenzy.

The dock area is very beautiful, and completely converted into little parks and walkways where people take their children and dogs out for a stroll in the sun. Closest to the station is the Minato Mirai 21 area, which is an ancient dock area where they've built lots of architectural wonders, all very earthquake-proof. It is here that you can see Japan's tallest building, the Yokohama landmark tower (296m), containing the world's fastest elevator which goes 750m a minute. Unfortunately I wasn't able to go up in it because the queue was huge, even at 10am. At the foot of the landmark tower is the ship Nippon Maru, which used to be a school boat and is now a museum/restorant. Also at the foot of the landmark tower was the Kanagawa Prefectural Police Band playing for their 60th anniversary.

Further along the docks is the Aka Renga park, or Red Brick Warehouse park, home to, sure enough, 2 large red-brick warehouses. I love the way the Japanese name things. next to the warehouse park is the International Passenger Terminal, a very design piece of architecture, all in wood with steel bars, where they need to put signs up all over to say what is the floor and where the roof starts. They also have some cute little warning signs: on one side they say "may be slippery" on the other they have a pircture of a hand and of a foot, both crossed out, meaning don't walk on your hands or with bare feet?

Chinatown is right behind that. There were not really many festivities. There were tons of stalls set up selling good luck charms and hot dumplings, but no firecrackers or dancers or anything. Not even many tiger pictures. Still, I bought a few good luck charms, as they are all in the shape of strings of chili peppers. Each colour has a special meaning, but I can't remember which is which. I have some dumpling here at home, so passed on those.

I found Yokohama to be a very pleasant city, and I plan to go back there later in spring when all the flowers are up. There are lots of museums to visit there, so will keep that in mind for the next rainy day.