11 May 2009

Today was an early morning since we had to move out of the NOYMC by 9am. I woke-up at 7:30am, and luckily I had packed almost everything the night before. We finished up our packing, turned in our neatly folded sheets, and left the NOMYC. Derrick, Seth, and I headed for Yokohama since that’s where we had made reservations at a Toyoko Inn. It took us a couple of train lines to get there, but we finally got there after about an hour. We left our stuff at the Toyoko Inn since check-in wasn’t until 4pm, and we went out to explore. I had bought an architectural guide book for the Yokohama prefecture, so we used that to find interesting buildings and architecture. We ultimately found many old and new buildings, all of which were fairly modern. We walked all over the city of Yokohama, even finding a small theme park along the water. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the city, even though it was extremely hot and humid. My skin has never gotten so sticky from the humidity in such a short amount of time. We returned to the hotel around 4:30pm to check-in, then took the train to the city center of Yokohama. We enjoyed the bright city lights at night, and I also purchased a tripod for my camera to shoot night photos. I bought it from Bic Camera, a large chain store, and it only cost 980 yen. Once opening it, the tag on the actual tripod said 8,190 yen as the retail value. I got a really good deal, so that was exciting! Around 8pm, we got dinner at Saizeriya, a really reasonable restaurant. I ordered meat spaghetti and garlic bread for 548 yen. It was a really good meal for a great price!
After taking the train back to our area of Yokohama, we decided to go back to the Osanbashi Yokohama International Port Terminal to retake our night photos from the previous night with Norio. Since I had my tripod this time, the pictures came out a million times better, so my purchase was already being put to good use. We arrived at the port around 10pm and surprisingly didn’t leave until around 1am. It was unbelievable how long we stayed there just taking pictures! Once arriving back at the hotel, we still had to do our laundry as well. Since the laundry facilities are so expensive at the NOMYC, we all brought all of our laundry to the Toyoko Inn where it is much more reasonable. Washing and drying the laundry takes about two hours, so we were all up until almost 4am. What a long day!