First Day in Yokohama

We were greeted with a rainy and cold first day in Yokohama, but decided to brave the elements so we could get to know our neighborhood before the weekend was over. Connor was up around 5:30am, so we fed him breakfast and pulled together our rain gear to walk around the immediate area and get familiar with the 7/11 stores and small supermarkets just a few blocks from the apartment. This excursion is when it sunk in for me that I can't read ANYTHING around me, and there isn't much that looks very familiar. This is slightly frightening, but also exciting and is definitely going to stretch me a bit out of my comfort zone. I am glad that I learned about 20 key phrases before the trip so I can be polite and ask for help if I need it. I am also grateful for our phrasebook, and for the fact that I am very adventurous as far as food goes. But none of this helps me to read signs or labels on things. Luckily though Dylan can read Hirigana and Katakana so we made our way through the corner store filling our cart with eggs, bread, tofu, rice crackers, yogurt, apples, bananas and some pre-made udon noodle dish that we thought could be breakfast. We also got a few things that we weren't sure what they were just for the fun of it. One of them turned out to be a powdered drink with green tea and milk that you add hot water to. I could have spent hours in there looking at all the endless strange stuff filling the aisles. Here is our udon (and lots of other undetermined stuff) lunch with apples slices:

We walked to the Kannai Station where Dylan will take the subway to work, the Isezaki Mall which is an outdoor pedestrian only shopping area, and found a large supermarket where we will probably do the majority of our grocery shopping. In the afternoon Chuck and Kevin came over to work on the big presentation during Connor's nap. Then we all took a trip to the Yokohama Chinatown, the largest in Asia and one of the largest in the world. It is about a ten minute walk from our apartment. We found a great place to have lunch and worked our way through an appetizer of thousand year old eggs (which we now know are never actually more than 100 days old - phew!) noodle soups and basket after basket of dim sum deliciousness:

We found out at the restaurant in Chinatown that Connor enjoys all kinds of dim sum, and also is skilled at slurping noodles: