Week 24 - A short trip to celebrate Ian's birthday

 Edited BY

G P Kennedy

        

Ian & Minako – Tokyo, Japan

 Hello again from a cooler Tokyo, we are both well, the temperatures are a bit lower and more bearable especially at night. In fact, last night was our first without any air-conditioning for ages; just open windows giving a fresh air breeze!

 The daily average for new coronavirus cases is currently 171 in Tokyo, 22857 in total and there have been 382 deaths. Nationally the daily average is 648 with 75206 in total and 1441 deaths. So the figures are still on a slow downward trend here, it's shocking and worrying to see the steep rise in cases in other parts of the world such as the UK, France, and India.

 From next week some rules are being relaxed to allow more people to attend large sporting events, concerts, etc. And the measures to discourage late-night eating and drinking in restaurants will be loosened.

 We feel more relaxed about traveling, not a lot but going to different places now so we enjoyed a trip to Yokohama with an overnight stay in a hotel on the bay. Yokohama is normally a day trip about 30 kilometers away from our place, it’s south of Tokyo so involves a couple of trains. 

 This time we wanted to get around the Yokohama Triennale and some other things at a leisurely pace without worrying about getting back late we decided to make it a two-day break. It was also a birthday treat for me (Ian).

 On the way, we stopped off for lunch at one of the best vegan restaurants on the planet; it’s a small but delightful place in Jiyugaoka. The meal was beautiful and full of delightful surprises, a nice way to break up the journey.

There’s a lot to like about Yokohama, it’s a large, historic port City with some massive architecture both old and new and maritime-themed public artworks, etc. Very similar to Liverpool – my hometown - but a bit warmer. 

 

We went around the maritime museum, which is a lot smaller than Liverpool’s but still interesting and one of the Triennale artworks was there. As well as the usual temperature checks and hand sanitizers we were required to wear plastic gloves here as a few displays could be handled.

 We were saving the main Triennale exhibitions till the following morning so we had time to go around the Nissan Art Award exhibition in the new, high-tech Nissan pavilion. This is quite a prestigious prize so the standard of the 5 finalists is pretty high and is well worth seeing though most people entering the pavilion went in the opposite direction to drool over the latest automobiles! 

 Yokohama is also worth exploring at night, scenic walks along the promenades, sit and watch the boats, illuminated buildings, and artworks, nice places to eat and drink. We went up to the observation deck on the 69th floor of the Landmark Tower (in Japan’s fastest elevator, eek!) for the 360-degree panoramic nighttime view. 

 The views from our hotel room were also awesome both at night and early the next morning. We got up at 5 a.m. to watch the sunrise across the bay.

There is staff at the hotel entrance to check temperatures and make sure we used the hand sanitizers before handing us tickets verifying that we seemed safe.

 Breakfast was interesting. Many hotels have stopped doing the normal buffet breakfast thing preferring to deliver trays to rooms 

Our hotel is continuing as usual but asking the guests to wear masks as well as giving a plastic glove to each person to use when selecting items from the buffet tables. 

 After checking out we went straight to the Yokohama Museum of Art which was just a few minutes' walk away. We had pre-booked the time slot, as numbers are limited, and went through the usual checks and sanitizing before spending about 3 hours enjoying the various artworks across two sites. 

 The organizers have done a fantastic job to get all this together in the current conditions. The opening was only delayed by two weeks in July and apart from having fewer visitors, the show is of the usual high standard. 

To prevent heatstroke, there were colorful umbrellas for the visitors who walk from one venue to the other. Again, each umbrella was sanitized, that must be a huge task for the staff. We truly appreciated their effort to ensure visitors’ safety.   

After a leisurely lunch, we were in good time to travel home before the evening rush hour.

 An entertaining, enthralling, and exhausting couple of days and a welcome break from Tokyo, looking forward to more similar excursions.