Yokohama

 

Thursday 18^th September 2025

Wore ourselves out yesterday and the heat hasn’t helped so we decided to have a ‘quiet’ day in Yokohama. Foraged for breakfast at a combini (convenience store). There’s so many different ones here. I sat for a while and wrote the past 2 days blog and got them posted.

Chinatown here in Yokohama is the largest of 3 in Japan and it’s certainly bigger than ours in Sydney. There are 4 gates guarding the entry to this one but we only saw one, and a ornate temple. Patience is definitely a virtue when it comes to taking photos. There was a young couple in their King and Queen t-shirts, I kid you not, with a pram standing bang in front of the gate we saw, Zenrinmon Gate (Goodwill Gate as I found out later). 

 

Must have been a vibe put out by the gate, because I didn’t call out to them and ask them to move on after they took their pics. Waited and waited and waited, and eventually they moved to the side, totally clueless that there were others waiting for a photo. 

 

So many yummy looking food options, it was hard to know what to choose. I’d read about a really good soup dumpling place, but there was a long queue, which is always a good sign, but it was hot and I didn’t want them badly enough to stand out in the sun any longer than I had to. We decided to find a place where we could sit and there was one just along the road. The tout out the front called to us and explained the deal his place had, sounded very reasonable so in we went. A woman brought over the menu and explained what was on offer, no mention of what we had been offered by the guy out front. We explained what we had come in for and she looked clueless and asked who told us that. We told her it was the guy out front, so we all went back out to ask him. His turn to look clueless and explained a totally different deal and denied all knowledge of what he had told us. Grrrr. We left.

Sometimes the hidden gems are just that. Hidden gems. So, down a narrow side alley (dare we?) we found our hidden gem. More food than we could eat, but not by much, and 2 beers for around AU$35. We had ordered 2 beers and the woman looked at us strangely and pointed to the menu. We didn’t realised she was trying to tell us the beers we ordered were long necks! Oooops. Lol.

 

I noticed a box of fortunes outside when we were leaving. You put 100 yen in the box, lift the lid and take a fortune, open it and if you like it you keep it. If you don’t like it, you tie it to the strings under the stand. We got one each and both liked what we got. Mine was a love fortune, Daikichi, and said that I was “generous and big hearted, don’t worry about the small stuff and always stay calm. Focus on blue today. When you let go of something old, something new comes along.”

The other place of interest for today was Mega Don Quixote, or Don Ki for short. Most are quite big, but this one is MEGA! There were a couple of things that I was after, having read about them on travel pages by other travellers. And it was nice to be in the a/c.

After such a big lunch we didn’t need much for dinner so back to the konbini. I got a poke bowl and Trevor had something with meat and rice. We settled in with our food and found a baseball game to watch on TV. The plan is to go back in to Tokyo tomorrow so an early night is in order.