A trip to Yokohama

Just the other day I decided that rather than pay someone $45 to take my paperwork to the LTO (Land Transportation Office) I'd do it myself.

The LTO is about 40km (25 miles) away from here, but takes nearly an hour to get to, even with the use of toll roads, but I was set for an adventure and had the car stocked with little baby sized water bottles, crackers and string cheese, plus a pile of yen, so we were set to go. Here are some pictures from my adventure.

Never has a Semi looked so big as when you see them in Japan!

The sides of the tollway through Yokohama are lined with windows, for kilometers and kilometers, it's really an amazing thing. I wonder how much time is spent washing them each year.

Here is a brave fellow.

This is the little paper I got one of in the video. It tells the person at the next toll booth where you got on the tollway at so they know how much to charge you. It certainly beats tollways like the E470 in Denver that makes you stop every 2 miles to pay them another $2. Jerks! haha, anyway...

We ended up making a day of it and I'm sure offended some very nice folks in a little Ramen shop by the LTO, by not eating the food we ordered (as I mentioned in my video, everything tasted like fish, even though I'm pretty sure it was beef broth in my ramen). Japanese custom is to eat everything you are served, even down to a final grain of rice, and in turn, this restaurant didn't even have the means to dispose of our leftovers inside the building. I saw the poor lady looking around trying to figure out what to do with it and finally just set the dishes on the floor by the back door. ooops! I tried, I really did. For those of you who don't know, I'm a vegetarian, so even trying to eat the beef broth was a huge stretch for me, but to have the overwhelming smell and somewhat taste of fish mixed in was more than I could deal with. I managed to eat about 10 or 15 bites before there was just no way anymore would go down. I hadn't even meant to order the ramen for me. I just wanted some rice and some noodles for DD because she was hungry and I figured I could wait until we got home. However, when I don't speak Japanese yet and the only English the man behind the counter spoke were infact rice and noodles, it made it hard to portray that I just wanted a little dish with some rice and some noodles, so we had a little dish of rice and a huge bowl of Ramen, each with a big slab of some sort of boiled meat set on top and a 3in x 3in square of Nori tucked into the side. DD grabbed the Nori tried a taste and that was that, she wasn't eating anything there... So we paid, I gritted my teeth at the rudeness I knew I was perpetrating and we got out of there as fast I could.