Hey there, Joel
Today was a day of confronting reality. We might be on vacation, but Mother Nature is not. While yesterday was clear, breezy, albeit quite hot and humid, today started out nice, but by the afternoon turned. Typhoon Number 10 blew in today and resulted in a couple emergency alerts and a four hour sit on the bullet train, not traveling. Today's theme: A Sudden Change of Plans.
One of our most looked-forward to activities is supposed to be Friday evening in a small little town in Mie Prefecture making and eating dinner with a Farmer couple at their house. That right there sounds like a fun night, but it would have also included some of the best Wagyu beef you can ever find because that town is famous for it. I love beef! However, it's literally impossible to get down there now. No trains. No planes. Not even cars since the main expressway is closed. We are—quite literally—stuck in Tokyo. Which is amazing!
We started the day storing our luggage, to have it shipped to our hotel later this week when we were planning on coming back to Tokyo. The nice woman at the hotel this morning wrote out a note explaining what we wanted at the shipping company so they could understand exactly what we needed. And, we think it worked. We will see on Sunday! Joel is leading us around and doing a great job with his Japanese, especially considering how hard it is to keep that up over 2 decades!
Our main destination today was Yokohama, a sister city to Tokyo just a short 30 minutes south. Right off the station there is a huge 3 tower complex of shopping that we wandered around for a few moments. It had one of the longest escalators we've ever seen. There are so many escalators here!
Right by this big mall is the Cup Noodles museum. It is the most unironic tribute to that delicious meal in a styrofoam cup. It was filled with inspiring messages of hope, perseverance, and looked like an incredible art museum, and it treated itself that way, as well, right up until the cattle herding that happened where people were making their own CupNoodles. (Yes, we made our own, too).
As the rain started to roll in we decided it was time to head south to Nagoya - a 90 minute ride away via the Bullet Train. We bought our tickets and waited on the covered platform while the rain intensified. After a moment our train pulled up and we quickly boarded and found our seats. Before too long we were moving along at 180mph down the coastline. Sadly that speed was short lived as the rain got even worse and the powers that be had our train stop at the next station to wait it. Which we did. For a long time. Eventually we got off the train, picked up a refund paper and grabbed a local train back to Yokohama to stay the night.
Despite our four hour sit on the bullet train this evening waiting for the weather that never cleared, we still walked a lot today, almost 10 miles. We pray for the safety of the Japanese people with this typhoon.