landmark tower – Anime QandA

Japan Trip 2017 – Day 15 & 16

The fifteenth and sixteenth day of my Japan Trip 2017, don’t get your hopes up

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, Day 13 and Day 14 are also available to read.

So you promised a “not very exciting Day 15 and 16”, care to elaborate? The irlwaifu Sharon has a chronic illness and the fact we’d been more or less put in 2 full weeks of travel activities meant exhaustion had struck her in a big way so we didn’t really do anything active or exciting these two days so she could rest up.

Sorry to hear it. No worries, a day of Sharon resting means a day (or two) of me going out and shopping at anime stores which is good for me, but bad for you readers as there’s not a lot to showcase. But here it goes anyway!

We went for a walk through Yokohama’s pristine business district nearby our hotel, there was some gorgeous autumnal foliage on the trees, so if that’s your thing enjoy the photos!

Afterwards Sharon went back to the hotel to sleep while I undoubtedly sought out some lewd anime store filled with scantily clad waifus. It’s what I do. (No pictures, sorry perverts). Afterwards we went for dinner at one of the many restaraunts located in Landmark Tower, this time something less fancy than yesterday. A tasty pizza and exceptionally crispy potato chips.

You Americans out there might think it odd to put an egg on a pizza but Australians have been doing it for decades! Seems like the Japanese have caught on too!

And is that it for Day 15? Yep, and that was our last day in Yokohama. If you ever get the chance I recommend it for sure, especially visiting the area in and around Yokohama Landmark Tower, its clean, beautiful and surprisingly laid back for such a big city! Although here’s some last minute night time shots from our hotel window.

The city below, I did love watching the traffic zoom around like I was playing SimCity or something!

Me trying to photograph the hotel room next door like some pervy voyeur.

Right, thanks for that… so moving on from Yokohama where did you go for Day 16 and onwards? AKIHABARA, BABY!

Of course… Yes the last 4 days we were based in Akihabara (again) I did say I loved this place right?!

Oh you mentioned it once or twice… Good. So yeah, not a lot doing on this day, lots of shopping and some eating, here it is in that order.

Me admiring some “fine art” outside the Sofmap building.

And what’s that you are carrying? I’m glad you asked. That’s an anime figure I’d bought from Mandarake and here’s something important to know for all you would be purchasers of all things anime who are travelling to Japan. If you see something you like but don’t know if the price is worth it, GO TO MANDARAKE’s website! I wouldn’t call it the perfect solution but more often than not the price you’ll see (whether in stock or not) is the price you should be paying for secondhand anime goods. The figure in that bag I saw on five seperate occasions throughout Akihabara in big department stores and tiny toy stores. And the prices? Well as high as $550 US to averaging around $200 US to the price I eventually got at Mandarake’s brick and mortar store at $110 US. Be smart about your shopping.

This is the item in the ‘Mandarake’ bag, a Ryoko ‘Kill La Kill’ figurine. Even if you can’t speak Japanese, just show them the page from their website and they’ll more than likely be able to find the item for you.

And the food? Right, sorry, got sidetracked there for a minute. True to form I can’t remember what exactly lunch was, some chicken rice bowl from a restaurant inside the Akihabara UDX building.

And dinner was takeaway burgers from Japanese fast food chain ‘Mos Burger’, they are ~good~ but kind of overrated, if you want my quick and probably inaccurate rating of Japanese fast food burgers it goes:

McDonalds
Carl’s Jr.
Mos Burger
Wendys

That’s a meal deal for 2 people FYI, I’m not a buta yarou!

And that’s all for this portion of the trip? Yep. Sorry it’s a bit low on content but that’s how it goes sometimes! Join me next time when we visit shrines and stuff! At the very least it’s sure to be more photogenic than this post!

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Japan Trip 2017 – Day 14

The fourteenth day of my Japan Trip 2017, noodles and roller coasters oh my!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

If you liked my post and want to support my content, please consider supporting my Patreon page, or donating by buying me a coffee on Ko-fi!

Japan Trip 2017 – Day 13

The thirteenth day of my Japan Trip 2017, and what a view!

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 and Day 11/12 are also available to read.

New day, new city? That’s right, we’re in Yokohama! Which is actually not all that far from Tokyo (like a half hour express train from the heart of Tokyo). Despite that the place definitely has a different ~vibe~, at least where we stayed did. It almost felt like a more casual Tokyo but I couldn’t even put my finger on the reason why… anyway as I teased at the end of the last blog our hotel in Yokohama is the Yokohama Royal Park Hotel located inside Yokohama Landmark Tower which is the second tallest building in Japan! Floors 49-70 of the building have a five-star hotel and our room was on the 54th floor and, it was certainly an amazing experience to have a hotel room up that high!

We stepped out from under the underground subway station expecting to be greeted by sunlight only to be steeped in shadow. We turned around to find the behemoth building blocking out the sun! At least there was no getting lost trying to find it!

Directly beneath Yokohama Landmark Tower.

5 star hotel, huh? Swanky… Surprisingly enough this 5 star hotel was cheaper than all of our other 3 star Tokyo hotels. I say surprisingly but given the size of the building (the amount of rooms it probably has) and the fact its not in Tokyo means they probably have a hard time filling it up and so have to be comparatively affordable. And can we take a moment to talk about that view…

The view from our 54th floor of Yokohama Royal Park Hotel in Landmark Tower.

Lunch at a fish and chip shop underneath the tower. The fish batter had weird green herbs in it but was still nice.

So what did you get up to on this day anyway? Not a lot, as is usually the case on the day we check in to a new hotel. We walked around the waterfront district, which was very pretty and scoped out some things to do on the next day as we’d be staying in Yokohama for 3 days.

Some weird thing near Landmark Tower. This is a very useful caption, I am good at this.

There was a smaller fun-fair style place on the tower side of the bay, with the larger amusement park ‘Cosmo World’ being on the other side.

The aforementioned ‘Cosmo World’ amusement park. This is but a tease as we didn’t visit it until the next day.

Right so, “sightseeing” things around the hotel. Surely that wouldn’t take all day? Well I had to find the nearest Animate and scope that out too! Which we did, and we found lots of goodies, none of which I have photos for from the actual day. Oops~!

Of course, so what other pics do you have? Food of course! Now this might seem like a weird pick for dinner, but we went to Sizzler. Yes, the American buffet chain, why? Because Sizzler’s in Australia pretty much all closed up like 15 years ago (there still might be one or two floating around) so seeing as how there was one in Landmark Tower, we had to go!

Did it live up to your nostalgic expectations? Simply put, no. It was okay, but not worth the cost, but still experiencing a Japanese Sizzler was still interesting. Amongst the buffet they had “uniquely” Japanese things like steamed rice, silken tofu and edamame.

Uh-huh… And then? Here’s some night photography of the areas around Landmark Tower.

There was a tall ship permanently docked in the bay outside the hotel. No, We didn’t go on it.

And is that it? More or less! It was a relaxing transitional day, we spent a lot of the evening lounging around the hotel, enjoying the view. Speaking of which, here’s what the view from our hotel room looked like at night.

Thanks for reading, look forward to day 14 when we visit a museum for noodles and ride overpriced rides!

If you liked my post and want to support my content, please consider supporting my Patreon page, or donating by buying me a coffee on Ko-fi!