Japan Trip 2017 – Day 14

If you haven’t read Day 1 & 2 of my Japan Trip 2017 blog series, please do so before reading this post for context and continuity’s sake. Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 & 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11/12 and Day 13 are also available to read.

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Okay, Day 14, let’s go! Breakfast at the reliable ‘Vie De France’ is only reliable if you pick smart choices. While the top item in the picture, the pork cutlet in bread (it probably has a name in Japanese) was good, the chocolate scone was absurdly dry and almost inedible as a result. Oh well, teach me for getting something unhealthy for breakfast.

Right. And so after that? What were the plans for the day? The Cup Noodle Museum! I mean I’d probably be interested regardless but the fact of the matter is I love Nissin brand Cup Noodles and the Japanese ones are the absolute best in the world!

Three exclamation marks!!! Get hyped for noodles, son!

Okay, what do you do at a cup noodle museum? Well there’s the usual stuff, learning the history of how the first cup noodle was made, the legacy of the company, etc. Plus some cup noodle related art installations to pad out what is essentially something that takes 15 minutes to learn the entire history of.

A picture of two nerds in front of noods.

A replica of the kitchen the first cup noodles were made in. Complete with terrible lighting for photography!

All hail metal noodle overlord.

Is noodles art?

The noodles make a good point.

Seems kind of underwhelming… Maybe, but the real highlight comes from a separate part of the museum where you get to design your own cup noodle cup and then have it filled with custom ingredients and then have it vacuum sealed as if it were one you bought in a store!

Sharon drew an Umaru cup noodle cup! Mine was some terrible surrealism inspired trash because I can’t draw.

They let you crank the machine that flips the noodles to the bottom of the cup.

Pick your ingredients!

Sharon’s on the left (onion, chicken, beef and egg) mine on the right, (onion, beef, shrimp and crab stick). I do love seafood, even in dehydrated form!

‘Wrapped in plastic’

Then the plastic is ‘baked’ onto the outside of the cup to preserve the ingredients and you receive it! Itadakimasu!

Well it looks like you had fun at least! It was, I recommend it though the whole ‘making your own’ cup noodles would be strictly for people who are interested in eating them as it costs about 3 times the amount of buying a cup noodle off the shelf.

Here’s the view from a balcony in the cup noodle museum.

And then after that? Exploring a nearby (like directly across the street) shopping complex, it was very odd and Hawaiian inspired. Though I didn’t take any pictures so you’ll have to take my word for it! After that and some lunch (also not pictured, don’t worry you’re not missing anything) we headed over to Cosmo World–the theme park I teased in the previous blog!

The sun was just setting when we arrived.

And how do you rate Cosmo World as an amusement park? It’s got a great seaside location and it photographs a treat at night. But the rides are pretty generic, the log flume was probably the most fun of all the rides though the roller coasters had individual charms. The real problem with the place is the price, unlike some theme parks you can’t just pay a one-off fee and ride everything as much as you want all day, that’s because the park doesn’t have an entrance gate, you can just walk on off the street. Meaning that you have to pay per ride which would be fine if it was cheap. But paying between $5 and $10US per ride per person seems pretty steep. But then again maybe it makes sense for people who don’t want to ride everything multiple times.

Some other rides located mid-way between Cosmo World and our hotel.

This part of Yokohama is absolutely stunning at night.

And what about dinner? I presume there’s dinner pics? There’s always dinner pics. We were spoilt for choice at the Landmark Tower, there’s literally 30+ restaurants in the building and it took us about an hour to decide on a place. We settled on something a bit more up-market, bit romantic, with a nice view and a lounge singer crooning out Western songs in broken English. I had the Spencer Roll Roast Beef, which I can’t say I’ve ever had in Australia but was so delicious that I’m honestly looking forward to go back to Japan so I can have it again.

The restaurant was called ‘Mangia Mangia’ more restaurants should put their names on the plate, makes my job easier!

View from our table at ‘Mangia Mangia’.

But what about desert? I didn’t have any myself, but downstairs in the shopping mall part of ‘Landmark Tower’ Sharon found an ice cream chain that was doing a collaboration with the anime ‘Yuri! On Ice’ so she ordered the ‘Pork Cutlet Bowl Ice Cream’ which came with a ceramic character bowl, gotta love the fact that you can get anime merch even at an ice cream chain!

It’s meant to look like a pork cutlet bowl, with the ‘rice’ being a lemony sorbet, the ‘meat’ being represented by a preserved fruit of some sort, the ‘egg’ a citrus jelly and the ‘green onion’ being apple juice spheres. She said it was delicious.

Had to find a way to squeeze anime into this somehow, huh? Well it is an anime blog after all… And that’s it for Day 14, stay tuned for a not very exciting Day 15 and 16!

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