Category: Trip

Today we visited Yokohama to see the Cup Noodle Museum!

This is a museum dedicated to Cup Noodles, the original instant noodle. It’s also dedicated to the memory of their inventor, Momofuku Ando, who invented instant ramen in 1958 and cup ramen in 1971. He was said to eat an instant chicken ramen every day after inventing until his death at aged 96 in 2007.

The museum is small but full of charm, and we both loved the room showcasing Nissin ramen products over the last 50+ years.

That’s less than a third of what was on display! It was fun seeing all the flavors and packaging, and hunting for the unique ones such as the first licensed one (Doraemon, in 1976), a version in a transparent cup, or even one that came with a mini Gundam kit!

But the highlight surely was making our own cup noodle! For a measly ¥500 each, we first got to decorate our cups:

Then we got to turn a crank to add noodles:

Then an attendant added flavour and four toppings of our choice. KLS picked cheese, kimchi, onions and corn on chili flavour, and I went with shrimp, onions, egg and little chicken naruto on ‘original’ flavour (there was no chicken option):

They were then sealed and shrinkwrapped:

And lastly we got to package them into bubble pouches for a safe trip home. Here they are in our hotel room:

It was a load of fun for a piddly price. Will we ever eat them? Who knows? 🙂

We saw a lot more in Yokohama today including a ropeway, an observatory and some amazing shops. But I’m too tired to write any more right now so I’ll dedicate this one just to the noodle museum. It was great 🙂

We’re back in Japan, for a winter trip! It’s my 10th (or 11th?) time here and Kristin’s 8th (9th), and we’ve been looking forward to this trip for a long time.

The flight was hellish – it’s almost impossible to get comfortable for long periods even in the ‘Premium Select’ class – but uneventful. Unfortunately one of our bags didn’t it: we could tell from the Apple tag we hid inside that it was still in Atlanta when we got to Japan! Delta will deliver it to our hotel once they get it here, which is hopefully soon. Luckily most of the important stuff (warm coats, toiletries, medicine) is in the suitcase that made it so it could have been worse.

Our first hotel room is large and comfy and very well-located and after check-in we spent a couple of hours exploring the Ameya-Yokocho and (of course) buying stuff like this guy:

That’s Ultraman 80 by the way, one of my favourite Ultras. He’s only the first of what I expect to be a lot of Ultra-purchases this trip. We also saw gachas, and played UFO machines and bought delicious snacks before crashing in the hotel. After about 30 hours with no sleep we better get a good rest tonight since tomorrow has a full schedule!

I plan on doing my best to blog daily, so stay tuned to see what adventures we get up to these next two weeks!

We spent the last few days in the city, and lots of fun was had. Here’s a few random snaps.

As with last year we booked a room with a balcony. The weather was (mostly) beautiful and we ate most of our meals out on this balcony.

A random shot of action figures in a comic shop. I didn’t buy any, but lots of other stuff was purchased!

You can’t visit NYC without buying some hot roasted nuts. We always get cashews and they’re delicious.

Only the day we arrived was there any rain, but I probably just held this umbrella just to enable a funny photo 🙂

Random stickers seen on the streets, mostly on scaffolding or electrical boxes.

Don’t know what this was about, but there were signs warning people not to carry weapons onto Times Square. We saw lots of heavily armed police as well. Maybe this was in preparation for a protest?

Corn from the Saturday street fair. It was great 🙂