Friday, November 10, 2017; Disembarkation & Yokohama

Friday, November 10, 2017; Disembarkation & Yokohama

We set an alarm to get us up in time for breakfast.  It is certainly getting harder to get up before 8:00AM, so we must be completely over our jet lag.  The ship had pulled into Yokohama in the wee hours of the morning, so when we awoke, Yokohama’s Osanbashi Pier was right out our balcony.  We had our last breakfast in the International Dining Room and completed our packing.  As Ben was showering, Janet was on the balcony, and spotted Jack and Sharon walking on top of the Osanbashi Pier.  She was able to hail them and we met them inside the terminal as we walked off the ship.  We caught up with Jack and Sharon and gave them one of Ben’s scopolamine gel syringes for the trip.  We exchanged last minute trivia tips and then walked off to the Yokohama Bay Hotel, through the Minato Mirai district past the red brick warehouses and the Cup Noodles Museum.  Jack pulled one of our suitcases, lightening the load.  It was an easy and flat walk to the Yokohama Bay Hotel from the Osanbashi Pier.  

The weather was perfect for us.  We had partly cloudy skies and temperatures in the upper 50’s to mid 60’s.  Not too cold and not too hot to be doing a lot of walking around outside.  

Ben had activated AT&T’s international day pass so for $10/day he was able to roam on the local cell phone network and use his normal domestic Data allowance internationally. It was less hassle than arranging to have a rental mobile hotspot delivered to the hotel, and about the same price per day.

We dropped our luggage off with the bell clerk, and then walked to the Cup Noodles Museum with Jack and Sharon.  We toured the museum, which was interesting in that you could create a whole museum around Cup-O-Noodles.  We learned way more about Momofuku, the inventor of instant Ramen Noodles, than you could ever want to know.  There is a small food court serving international variations of instant ramen noodles through out SE Asia and even to Kazakhstan.  

Our 1:00PM appointment at the Kirin Beer Factory was rapidly approaching so we bid Jack and Sharon farewell so they could climb aboard the Diamond Princess and head to the Horizon Court Buffet, while we negotiated the JR railroad system for the first time, and made it to the Kirin Beer Factory reception desk just minutes before the tour started.  The Kirin Beer factory has invested an amazing amount of resources to create a nice visitor center and tour, complete with a tasting room at the end of the tour.  We got to taste their house made malt, and sample first and second wort from their mash.  Kirin’s claim to fame is to use only the first wort or first batch of liquid filtered from the mash to make its beers.  Most other beer manufacturers add water to the mash after the first wort, and add the second wort to the first wort to create the liquid for fermentation.  The first wort was noticeably more flavorful and deeper in color and aroma.  

The factory floor is spotless, and they also had windows overlooking the packaging equipment for putting the beer into bottles and cans. We were surprised to see that they also put it into 2 Liter plastic bottles.

The factory also has a culinary laboratory where you can take classes and learn to make beer.  After you create the mash, they ferment, filter and age it for you and in 6 weeks, you have your very own homemade beer delivered.  That sounded like an interesting adult education class.

In the tasting room, we got a small package of Kirin snack mix, which was rice crackers and peanuts. You could buy this snack mix in the gift shop.  We each had a schooner of each of the three beers they were sampling.  We were pretty buzzed by the time we left the tasting room and found our way back to the Hotel.  

The JR trains are remarkably clean and the trains did run EXACTLY on schedule.  We used our PASMO cards to tap in and tap out of the stations hassle free.  

We got checked into our hotel and were surprised by how nice and large the hotel room was.  It had a spectacular view of the harbor, including the Ferris wheel and the Diamond Princess at the Osanbashi Pier.  We were able to watch Jack and Sharon sail off out of the harbor under the Yokohama Bridge in the Diamond Princess while sipping tea in our room on the balcony.  

The bathroom has a separate enclosure for the toilet which is equipped with a heated and deodorizing seat with bidet and bottom wash. The Japanese must have the cleanest bottoms in all of the world.

The room also comes with an Android guest smart phone that includes free calling and LTE data service.  It says it will auto erase data after your stay is over, but you have to be a little suspect about trusting your data to a free service.  It has a city guide but the only feature we really used is google maps which was very helpful in figuring out how to get around on the transit system.

After a bit of rest, and tea, we mustered the energy to take on the subway and find our way to the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum, which is basically a collection of Ramen shops from all over Japan and the world tucked into a reproduction of 1950’s Tokyo with a museum of the history of Ramen.  The ground floor is the museum and gift shop.  As you descend the steps into the two basement levels, you go into the past and into narrow alleys lined with tiny Ramen shops.  Adding to the ambience, they had a bar and a small stage with live singers doing karaoke with both period and more modern pop music tunes.  

There is a 310Yen ($2.73) cover charge to enter the museum, but we had a coupon from our hotel reducing the cover charge to 250Yen ($2.20). Bowls of Ramen from the shops range from 570Yen ($5.02) for a “Mini Bowl” to 950Yen ($8.36) for a regular bowl of gluten free ramen.  The mini bowls were actually a normal lunch sized serving, while the regular bowls would fill up someone with a hearty appetite.  

There are 9 Ramen shops, and each offers 2 or 3 different ramens.  Janet and Ben sampled a total of 4 different ramens with Miso, Shoyu and Tonkotsu bases and wavy, straight, thick and thin noodles.  There are innumerable permutations of broths, soups, toppings, noodle thicknesses, textures and sizes.  In front of each shop is a vending machine where you put in your Yen, select which Ramen style and size you want, and then you hand the ticket to the person in the shop, who then passes it to the Ramen chefs.  The ramens were all delicious and a treat to the senses.  We wished we had bigger stomachs to sample more varieties, but even in our post-cruise ship distended states, we couldn’t manage more than splitting the 4 “Mini” ramen bowls between the two of us.  The museum does have an annual membership.  If you lived in Yokohama, it would be worth it to be able to get your fix of ramens from around Japan and the world in one place.

We returned to the hotel, which is connected to an enormous indoor mall that allows you to go to two different train stations (Minatomirai and Sakuragachi) either entirely indoors or under cover with some moving walkways.  The mall and hotel were all decked out in Christmas decorations, including some spectacular Christmas trees.  These Japanese really enjoy decorating for western holidays.  We turned in early.  Tomorrow, we move to the Villa Fontaine Hotel in the Shiodome district of Tokyo, which is an hour’s train ride away.