Thanks to Anzu, I was able to book my trip to Kyoto without too much trouble, but another good thing was that the departure location was from Yokohama. Why is that a good thing? Well I already had plans to meet a few friends that day in Yokohama, thus it made it much easier.

That day, I had plans to meet with Arisa Oginuma in Yokohama in the afternoon. She would then walk me around Yokohama, showing me the famous parts of the region. I had never been with Arisa alone before and had barely talked to her before, so I was a little scared about how it was going to go.

It took us a while to find each other through the station, because just so you know, the Yokohama train station is CRAZY huge. Once we met, we walked out and headed straight to Chinatown. It's interesting how the mind works. I remembered a lot of the streets and shops from last time. But this time, Arisa gave me more explanations about the history, although I didn't remember most of it. It made it much more pleasant. We stopped and ate some nikuman, which are a kind of big white dumpling.


Our discussion would flow nicely and I have to say I really enjoyed our time together. After the Chinatown, we walked through the city, seeing famous streets, restaurants, and finally to the sea port. For those who don't know the history of Yokohama and why it's famous, Yokohama was one of the first cities in Japan, which opened to the world for commerce in the 18^th century. Thus it has a lot of commercial stuff added to the history of the city. It was a beautiful view, I must say. It was quite windy that day but man was it ever gorgeous.

We walked up on one of the touristic boat/platforms and here's the view from there.

From there, there was an entry to the undersea part of the boat in which you could enter. At that time, there happened to be the World 2015 Koma Championships. (Koma is the Japanese word for top.) Anyways, I got see how that was haha! I did not know such a thing even existed. We left, and headed back towards the station, but we made a stop at Starbucks for a Cherry Hot Latte. Arisa happens to work at another Starbucks nearby so she knew that it was the first day the cherry flavor was being sold. Since the "sakura hana-mi" (cherry blossom) was coming, Starbucks creates this product to attract customers. That's my marketing classes kicking in. Anyway, since she works at a Starbucks, we got a small discount. We sipped and talked, and ended up staying too long haha. We rushed back to the station, rode the train and ran to meet Anzu and Keigo at the determined location.



From there, we walked all four of us together to the restaurant Anzu had picked out and made reservations for us. As we sat down, everyone laughed at the fact that I was only wearing a polo shirt. I've had this problem ever since I have arrived here, I find it much hotter than most people. Anyways, we had a great dinner. I wasn't too sure how it was going to go since I also had never spent much time with Keigo. But I have to say it was quite fun. I was really tired already by that time, but their energy kept me up and going. We ate a delicious meal, with interesting new food I had never eaten before. After that, we left and they walked me over to the station. I thought I was going to say my goodbyes there, but we still had about 4 hours until my bus arrived so they decided to go into another restaurant haha... we ordered drinks and some small appetizers and cakes. We talked about just about anything, the conversation never stopping. And we laughed a lot. Everyone was probably tired by that time. I know for a fact that I was exhausted.

After about 45 minutes there, we decided to check where the actual bus stop was. But by that time, we still had one hour till the departure. I told them they could all go back home since it was already 10:30 but to my great surprise, they stayed with me until I got onto the bus. We entered a Starbucks and got some more drinks. We sat down and chatted until the store closed at 11. My phone was dying and I was going to use my charger to charge it but Arisa forced me to use hers (portable battery charger). We took funny pictures, made jokes, and more jokes and laughed and laughed some more. It was very pleasant and I was extremely thankful they stayed the whole time for me. Soon came 11:20, we walked over to the bus, and I waved to them one last time before leaving.

Yokohama had a much better flavour from that day on. I really am a lucky guy.