We headed out to Yokohama with our good friends from Hawaii who are stationed in the Kanto Plain and were great taking us out the previous night to the 'Kill Bill' restaurant in Roppongi, which was fun. It made me wonder how I'd be living here and going to notable places on a whim as if it's a casual occurrence. That would be awesome.
We detoured along the way to another stop which I'll post pics on later, but if we were driving straight from the hotel to the Landmark Tower in Yokohama, it was only a 30-minute drive. I'd have thought it was going to be longer and congested traffic, but not even close. And once we arrived, even getting parking at the basement lot was painless. Stars aligned? Efficiency? I think the latter. For a major international metropolitan area, there are more good things to say about driving than not.
The Landmark Tower is the third tallest building in Japan. It's also sometimes called the 'chess piece' because it looks like a rook, and it's a place I've wanted to check off from the bucket list for a long time. When we got into the main lobby, we immediately headed towards the elevator lobby that would take us up to the 69th floor 'Sky Garden' which offered views that would maybe only be bested by the Tokyo Sky Tree.
The elevator ride up was impressive, and is one of the fastest in Japan. But you couldn't tell other than looking at the numbers being displayed on the front wall of the elevator telling you how many meters per minute you were traveling. At its fastest, we had went 750 meters per minute, or 28 miles per hour. In an elevator, that's fast!
Fast enough to get a beer to accompany the view!
And again, Mt Fuji eludes us.
Another view of the tower from the south as we headed next door via the Yokohama Air Cabin Ropeway to Yokohama World Porters
Imagine my surprise seeing this when we walked in. But it's part of World Porters' 'Hawaiian Town' that offers alot of stuff we'd find back in Hawaii, and it was cool to see the stores and restaurants dedicated to Hawaii's popular clothing brands and local style cuisine.
It was a great day spending time in Yokohama and I only wish we had more time to do further exploring, which seems to be the theme here in all the places we stayed at during the three weeks we were in Korea, Okinawa and mainland Japan. What made the last leg special was that we spent it with family friends who I have known for literally almost a lifetime and shared the memories with me, Mrs Lenman and Our Boy.
'Tokyo III' ? Yes.... another trip is being planned, and I can't wait to return! ~
