Ewens-Downing Adventures in Asia

After sleeping a couple hours to recover from “the incident“, I activated the rental cellphone I had delivered to the hotel via the web. I got in touch with Kenji, our friend who lives in the Yokohama area. We would meet Kenji at the Yokohama station and get some dinner together. So we took off for the local train station Sakuragicho that was just outside the Landmark Tower building we were staying in. We found a direct route from within the hotel around to a pedestrian bridge that went right to the station.

When we got to Yokohama station it finally set in: we were in Japan. Upon going downstairs to the main station platform we had to just stand for a bit taking it all in, there were hundreds of people… everywhere… going all different directions… silently not running into each other and getting to/from their trains. It was mind boggling for us initially. So many people in such a relatively small space. We stood with our mouths agape for a good couple minutes, wondering how we’d ever meet up with Kenji in this chaos. I called Kenji on cell phone and told him where we were in the station. In a few minutes he appeared ad we were off to find dinner.

On the way to dinner we went through some stores in the mall around the station. Inside the Yamaha music store Ron found an amusing package of “Piano Scatt” that I just had to have a picture of. Ron posed and made quite the funny face, don’t you agree? What ever could this package contain?? I did a Google search and couldn’t find anything. OK musicians, please comment and let us know what we found here. I assume it is some kind of piano cleaning supply?

We followed Kenji through the huge shopping mall, out into the streets of Yokohama that surrounded the station. There were blocks of restaurants and stores, all catering to the commuters returning from their jobs in Tokyo.

Kenji knew of a good sushi restaurant and we were game for our first taste of authentic sushi in Japan. It turns-out that this sushi restaurant was a “sushi belt” restaurant. In San Francisco we have sushi boat restaurants where plates of sushi revolve in front of patrons on wooden boats propelled along in a waterway by swift currents in a water trough. In Japan they don’t do this. Instead they use a revolving mechanical belt. This way the plates can make 90-degree turns with no problem.

We got a table and stared with amazement at the double-decker revolving belt. On the top level was the sushi plates along with little signs telling people (in Japanese) what things were. On the bottom level of the moving belt were tea cups, bowls and other dishes. “What a great idea,” I thought to myself.

To make the self-serve atmosphere even better we also had a hot water spigot right at our table. We could make all the tea we wanted, when we wanted, how we wanted. That was pretty cool. And what was inside the little bucket? It was FULL of picked ginger. Kenji ordered us up some special dishes as we grazed on a few things from the belt.

It was all very fresh and good. But because we had sushi in the US every couple weeks, it wasn’t too surprising of an experience for us. The one exception was the Miso Soup. Kenji ordered a bowl for him and one for us to share. It was a BIG bowl of miso soup had some salmon tails in it for meat. That was definitely pretty different from what they do in San Francisco. At first we didn’t quite know what to do with the tails. We had to learn to use our chopsticks better to get at the meat. Kenji showed us how and we finished our first meal in Japan.