Our visit to the Cup Noodles Museum !!!

On Saturday, April 4, 2015, we visited the Cup Noodles Museum in Yokohama, Japan. 

In general, I'd probably avoid going there on a Saturday, but we could see the museum from our hotel room at the Sakuragicho Washington Hotel in Yokohama so it was a short walk - and we were still adjusting to Japan time and up at the crack of dawn anyway - so it actually worked out well.  We arrived about 45 minutes before the museum opened (highly recommended, especially if you want to make your own Cup Noodles.

The museum is located in a really nice touristy area of Minato Mirai 21.  It super easy to get to even if you're not staying in Yokohama - you can take a JR train to Sakuragicho Station and then it's a 15 minute walk (or you could take a bus or a taxi, I suppose - we like walking).  The area is super easy to navigate and it's not nearly as overwhelming as Tokyo.  There's an amusement park and a shopping center very close by and lots of other shopping areas and places to explore in the immediate area.  There is lots of familiar American food in this area too.  Check out the museum's web site for hours and entrance fee and all that since I'm sure they vary.

We joined the already growing line and waited to purchase our tickets.  We almost never had a problem getting English maps and things - at most places we went, they noticed us before we could even ask and rushed to bring us things in English.  Japan is awesome like that.  The main floor of the museum is open and modern feeling.  There's ticket windows and a gift shop and the stairs up the museum.

     

 

We immediately went to get our tickets to make our own Cup Noodles.  You don't get these tickets at the ticket window at the entrance - they are on a separate floor.  It is a very good idea to head here ASAP - everybody wants to do this and it gets PACKED very quickly.  

After securing our tickets to make our Cup Noodles, we explored the museum.  We started in the room with every Cup Noodles EVER on display.

As you walk through the museum, there are drawings on the wall explaining how Cup Noodles came to be what it is today.  All the captions are in English and Japanese.

 

While the history of Momfuku Ando and his Cup Noodles are definitely an important part of the museum, it's really all about creative thinking and innovation - super cool.  There are a lot of interactive exhibits that show how thinking outside the box leads to innovative ideas.  Some of these are in English, but they're all fun to play with and easy to follow.

    

There are also art pieces dedicated to Cup Noodles.  

We were able to get through the exhibits a couple times pretty quickly (get here EARLY!!!  By the time we left, people were shuffling through like cattle!)  By the time we were done, it was time to make our Cup Noodles!  Everything in Japan is ON TIME and this place is no exception!  If your reservation is for 10:15 AM, be there at 10:15 AM!  We joined the line and it moved very quickly and efficiently.  They showed us instructions in English and made sure we understood before handing us our cups and directing us to a table to decorate them.

 

You can spend as much time as you want decorating your cup.  Everybody seems to love doing this - ALL kinds of people are decorating cups.  It's a lot of fun.  They instruct you to put the date on your cup, but everything else is up to you.  

   

When you finish decorating your cup, you get to choose the ingredients for your Cup Noodles.  It all seems kind of chaotic and crowded, but it's super intuitive and efficient.  We have videos of this whole process that I will post soon.  After you choose your ingredients, your Cup Noodles gets sealed shut and vacuum packed in plastic.  Finally, you put your Cup Noodles in a balloon type bag thing - I have no idea what the purpose of this is, but you see people in Yokohama walking around with them all the time and maybe that alone is why!

We had lunch at the Noodles Bazaar - basically a food court with different stalls for various types of noodle dishes.  

 

You buy a ticket for the dish you want and take it to the window.  I went with Italian.

 

John had traditional Japanese...but was confused when he ordered.  He thought he was ordering ramen with 3 ingredients, but this is what he got:

Luckily, the dishes are small!  We shared some shaved ice for dessert.  It was super yummy.

 

By the time we finished eating, there was a long line to get into the Bazaar so, again, I advise getting there early!

We really enjoyed our trip to the Cup Noodles Museum.  We spent a total of about 4 hours here.  I'd highly recommend it to anybody visiting Yokohama and the Minato Mirai 21 area (both of which I also recommend).  There is a playground for kids that we didn't check out at all, but I imagine that makes it extra great for kids.  We'd like to visit it again with reservations to make our own ramen noodles (see the web site for details about the Chicken Ramen Factory).  You can see the rest of the photos we took at the museum here.

Mapping our Adventures

We ♥ Google Maps!  It is an incredibly useful planning tool and especially indispensable for traveling in Japan.  We add all the sites we want to see and use different icons to create loose categories (parks, shrines/temples, shopping, food, etc.) This helps us to understand the proximity of the various sites we want to see and allows us to group things together to form our itinerary.  We use the step-by-step walking directions to determine if things are really as close to each other as they appear to be.  It probably sounds mundane, but it's actually pretty cool. 

Japan 2015, Week 3 - Itinerary

I've never been away from home for more than 2 weeks so I wonder if I'll be homesick by the time we get to week #3...I think I'll probably just be craving real American food - like pizza that DOESN'T have corn and mayo on it.

These plans are still very much in the development phase so I don't have many details to add, but here's what we have so far...

Japan 2015, Week 2 - Itinerary

3 weeks of traveling = a ton of planning...especially when you only have just over a month to do all said planning!  We are not really, stressing out about it, though - once we got our plane tickets booked (easy) and found hotels (much more challenging), we were pretty much ready to go!  Planning helps make the waiting go by faster - and we'll be glad we did it in the end.  ☺ Here's the plan for week 2 of our Japanese Adventure!

Japan 2015, Week 1 - Itinerary

I like having a plan when we travel.  Not a rigid, minute-by-minute itinerary, but a solid framework or outline to provide some structure to our days.  It saves us from wandering around, trying to figure out what to do - and there are about 3 million options at any given time in Japan, so, multiply that by 20 days...going without a plan would be somewhat insane.

Japan, 2015

Hello World...

We are just over 3 weeks away from our 2nd trip to Japan - and we are super excited!

We hope to be more diligent about tracking and posting about our adventures this time.  We find other people's travel blogs very informative and useful - and we've referred back to our own documentation quite a bit in planning for our Adventures in Japan 2.0. 

That being said, adventuring is our top priority so no guarantees...

Kanpai!  乾杯!

Japan: Public Spaces

There were a few things we noticed pretty quickly in Japan.

First was there obviously are a lot of people. No kidding.. We got into Shinjuku at about 9pm on Friday night.. For those who don't know Shinjuku has a lot of entertainment, bars, arcades, big stores- a place people flock to for fun- like on Friday nights. So we were thrown into the bustling sea of people to try to find our hotel. Thus leading to item two...

Except for the bigger streets, most streets don't have street signs. Or even names really. Walking directions from google maps can literally be 'go straight, cross a crosswalk, cross a crosswalk, go left, cross a crosswalk, cross a crosswalk, go right, destination will be on the right.'. Not necessarily the most helpful directions when many of the streets look more like what would ne an alley in the US, or don't exactly go off at angles. Nor when on a Friday night in Shinjuku after traveling for close to 20 hours. But we found our hotel thanks to Amy's notes, which lead to item three...

Japanese people are polite. And nice. And respectful. And polite. Did I mention polite? The greetings, the bowing, the thank yous- it's probably how rich people get treated all the time. But the convenience store clerk at 11pm in a super busy part of town when dealing with an American doesn't know a 100 yen piece from a rock... So patient and polite. It just seems to be so engrained in the culture. I'm under no delusion that people didn't get super annoyed by this foreigner who doesn't speak more than 5 words of Japanese taking super long and have to be asked 4 times if I wanted my food nuked in the microwave.. But they were so nice, and apologized if some on their side held things up... Which leads to item four...

People do their jobs... and take them seriously. Yes, I did see people doing jobs they clearly weren't enjoying and there's obviously people who don't have any passion for their jobs. But they did their jobs. And not halfway- they did it the best they could. Service was amazing, food ordered came out freshly cooked and in almost no time at all. If someone wasn't in a task they would be restocking, dusting, reorganizing, greeting customers coming the door, cleaning... or just patiently waiting for someone to need help. Which leads to item five...

You don't tip in Japan. It's just not done, I think even rude or insulting. I guess they will run after you down the street if you leave anything. I'm assuming everyone at least is making an acceptable wage, but it's also cool. Everyone working there is all working there- you may be greeted and seated by a cook, have 3 different people come to your table when you press the button (there will be more on the button...)... Such amazing service, like 20% or easily more worthy tips... But nope. No tips.

That's all for now, there's a lot more to brain dump so will update soon!

WiFi or: how we really were on the internet in Japan

We were able to have internet pretty much at all times when in Japan.  Whether on a train, in a park, temple, or 100 yen store we could get to the internet.  But the truth is there was almost no open free WiFi anywhere.

Japan in review- drinks

Since there were vending machines and convenience stores everywhere we went in Japan there wasn't much opportunity to go thirsty.  I tried to keep a list of all the different drinks we tried, I know it's not complete and I may not have gotten my notes 100% correct, but better than nothing.

Japanese Adventures with Hello Kitty

In planning our trip to Japan, I randomly found an app on the iTunes store for my iPhone called "Visit Japan with Hello Kitty" - it was, apparently, only available from September 3, 2012 until March 31, 2013.  The official site was here and there's more Official info about it here - those are probably pointless links if the app is no longer available, but if you are able to find it, it's fun and I used it earlier today so I know it still functions.  I played with it a little before we left, but I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to do, besides provide a bit of info about touristy places in a cute format, and almost deleted it.  Luckily, I didn't - and happened to open it and click on the camera button - Hello Kitty magically appeared on my camera screen!

Tokyo Disneyland

We spent our last day in Japan at Tokyo Disneyland! It was bittersweet - all the awesomeness of Disney, but a little sad since we couldn't forget our adventure was almost over.

Updated photos!

We have uploaded more photos from Japan, there are tons left to be uploaded but we are trying to squeeze as much out of every day while we are still here!

Flickr Japan Spring 2013!

Kansai region, (pre) part 1

We're heading back to Tokyo tomorrow so I wanted to save a place for a summary of what we've done the past few days in Osaka and Kyoto.  John and I are both so completely exhausted by the time we are back in our hotel room with nothing else better to do than blog about it so you'll have to wait for more detailed accounts...(I'm not sure that sentence even made sense...)

TUESDAY:

• Amy vs. Dehydration
• Tokyo to Shin-Osaka via SHINKANSEN!
• Checked in to the Station Hotel Shin-Osaka

WEDNESDAY:
Kyoto

• Silver Pavilion
• Philosopher's Path
• Sakura!!!
• Temple with the Twin Dragons...

THURSDAY:
Western Kyoto

• Monkeys!
• Bamboo!
• Buddhas!
• More Buddhas!!!
• Even more Buddhas!!!!!

FRIDAY:
Kyoto

•  Golden Pavilion
• Big Boy...in Japan
• Shopping in Kyoto
• Narrowly escaped disaster #1
• Sakura: After Dark

SATURDAY:
Nara

• Osaka to Nara
• Oh deer...
• Narrowly escaped disaster #2
• Technology is rad

Osaka

• Amy and John make a very solid attempt to take Osaka... 

 
 ...the suspense is killing you, right???!!!  Probably not, but feel free to fake it for us - we don't think we're all that interesting we like inspiration (thanks, Mom!  We hope you noticed that we mentioned both the weather AND eating in our last post!).

Anyway, we are happy, we are tired, we have sore feet, we love Japan.

Our first photos are on Flickr!

We posted many of the photos we've taken so far - you can see them on Flickr (you can also click on the thing with the photos on the right side of the screen).

What we are excited to experience in Japan…

• The Japanese version of Western food
• Vending machines
• Buddhas…en masse
• Karaoke
• Efficient transportation (Shinkansen!!!)
• Japanese TV
• John wearing Japanese pajamas
• Tokyu Hands
• Sakura
• Kawaii
• …all the things we can't even begin to understand that we don't understand.

Itinerary Updates (draft)

• Tokyo guide
• Extra day in Tokyo; 1 less day in Kyoto
• No Kanazawa
• Disneyland during Tokyo Part 2
• Tokyo day trips - Kamakura and Nikko

Tokyo Free Guide (draft)

We are very excited to meet Chikako, our Tokyo Free Guide!  (I'll actually write stuff here at some point)

You can check out their web site here - http://www.tokyofreeguide.com/

General updates (draft)

• Passport
• Japan Rail Pass

 

• Currency exchange
• Studi Ghibli tickets

How we've learned about Japan

We get bored with Lonely Planet travel guides pretty quickly so these are a few things that we've used to augment our Japanese research:

 

Big Bird in Japan:

 

Jiro Dreams of Sushi:

 

Studio Ghibli:

 

Postcard from my dad, 1989:

Pretty good timing!

The first cherry blossom forecasts have been released in Japan - and it looks like we're in luck!  You can see the details (in English - not the easiest thing to find) here, but here are the dates that matter most to us (and by us, I mostly mean me - pretty pink flowers don't really excite John very much):

Location               Opening               Estimated Best Viewing 

Tokyo                   March 25              April 1 to 10

Kyoto                   March 28              April 3 to 12

Hiroshima              March 27              April 3 to 11

Osaka                   March 27              April 2 to 10

Nara                     March 30              April 3 to 11

I know these dates are likely to change and you can't really predict the weather blah blah blah (I'm from Minnesota - I get it), but it bodes well and makes me super excited!