Pittsburgh and Beyond 2023

When we arrived at Haneda airport, we were greeted by a Pikachu holding a bowl of ramen. The advertisement was for the Pokemon World Cup event in Yokohama, and I felt a dissonant sense of familiarity. The place didn’t quite feel like home to me — the ads, the diversity and sheer magnitude of the crowds felt both alien and enticing. They called to memory, entanglements of my favorite things. And I’ve never warmed up to a place so quickly.

We got on the Keikyu airport express line and transferred to the JR line to Yokohama, towards Shinjuku, a centrally-located neighborhood where we planned to stay for the next few days. T’s eyes were very red and sleepy, and I think we should’ve taken a taxi for this first trip to the apartment. There’s an underground maze featuring multiple transfers in all directions, that we somehow didn’t have much trouble navigating. Even when T is sleepy, he’s great at navigating.

We arrived at the busiest station in the world, Shinjuku station, and exited toward this massive view that was the heart of Tokyo. These crowds were all walking what felt like a very relaxed pace, and there were significant elevation changes in our path a bit north of Shinjuku, so you can see the rivers and deltas of people. The crosswalks here are very wide, perhaps 3x as wide as I’ve seen in the US, especially at the major intersections.

Perhaps we were very tired from our 22 hour commute, or perhaps the place we picked was a little too far away from the station. We are staying in a tiny apartment that’s about a 10-15 minute walk from the station. Maybe we’ll be happy we’re off the main street a bit later into the trip. The apartment was super cute and I’ll post more on the amazing, eco-friendly appliances in this apartment later.

At 5pm, we chilled out, decided we couldn’t sleep just yet; I asked T if he wanted to eat at the really adorable small restaurants in our neighborhood or conveyer belt sushi (both sounded so amazing to me, I was surrounded by my favorite cuisine), and he chose the latter. So we headed to our first fun food experience: conveyor belt sushi at Kura sushi, just a couple blocks away.

The experience was weirdly hilarious to me. The conveyer belt sushi restaurant had an ambience that was super high energy. The sushi is loaded onto plates onto high speed belts that stop for no one. The plates are secured under these bubble covers that hold the plate tightly in place, like lego bricks. So imagine the difficulty two sleep-deprived people had to 1. pick the plate, 2. lift the bubble cover, 3. detach the plate from the holder, 4. not drop the food, all the while the plate was moving. It was stressful! They also play rather manic, high-pitched, video game music while you eat.

Speaking of the gamified version of sushi eating (in which I had reservations about, related to overfishing), if you turned in 5 plates into the slot in the table, you had a chance to win a prize. T won a little eraser! The nigiri was decent and some of the combinations were delicious (like softboiled egg and tuna). Enjoy the pics!