Justin's Journey in New York: Tokyo, Yokohama, and My Birthday!

The breakdown: I spent 5 days up in Tokyo (Japan’s mega capital) and Yokohama (city just beside Tokyo that has a futuristic utopian feel) to attend a conference and celebrate my birthday (February 28th, thanks everyone for the messages and wishes). Lisa was my primary travel companion and besides her weird urges for almonds and zero calorie jelly, we had a great time together.

The above picture is Landmark Tower in Yokohama that served as our, well, landmark as we navigated the spotless streets and long moving walkways of the city (seriously, Yokohama made me think of Earth in the Star Trek universe—all perfect and peaceful with white buildings and ferries wheels).

Even though I’ve been to Tokyo before, there are still many parts of the city I wanted to explore. To help with this, I opted for a FREE TOUR of these desired areas with a volunteer tour guide (check out tokyofreeguide.com). Below is a picture of our guide, his friend, and Lisa. They’re all Japanese…can you spot the Japanese-American? With our guide’s knowledge of the city, Lisa and I had a fun time and accomplished our sightseeing goals (even though Lisa kept wanting to go into weird stores that made our guide nervous).

After two days and about 11 billion yen in Tokyo, we headed over to Yokohama for our conference. Lisa continued to crave almonds and zero calorie jelly (at this point I started emailing her boyfriend asking if I should intervene or something) and we enjoyed a night out in the area’s renowned China Town to celebrate my quarter century mark (25, baby!). Below are pictures of the evening…and after spending several days up in the Kanto area, we were all saying things like, “I’m almost out of money!” or “Either I have another beer tonight or lunch tomorrow…can’t swing both” It was cool.