Sunday : Yokohama (Photo post)
Sunday, I had a ticket to the Dragons-Baystars game in the evening, so I dragged ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jessed and katharos and their daughter Rebecca down to Yokohama to see Minatomirai and the stuff around there. I spent the afternoon hanging out with them, going up a tall building, eating okonomiyaki, wandering down Bashamichi. Then I went to the baseball game, where I wore my Dragons jersey and saw the Dragons lose, but something super-cool happened before the game - I got my first player autograph in Japan. Woohoo.
I took 613 pictures for the day, though most were of baseball. Here's a few (mostly not baseball, mostly cute pictures of Rebecca. And bears! And Doala!).
The first place we went in Yokohama was the Landmark Hotel observation deck. Here is where I prove that I am infact the tallest person in Japan.
In the plaza, there was a Build-a-Bear Workshop. I'm sure Rumi and Fire would get a kick out of this. Strangely, they didn't have any NPB uniforms for bears -- just Yankees, Marines, Red Sox, Giants... pretty strange, huh?
This is the "Yokohama Teddy" that is specific to this store.
Here we are at the okonomiyaki place. Kat is trying to convince Rebecca not to eat out of an ashtray. (It was a clean ashtray, but still.)
Jesse and Rebecca on the steps to the walkway by the Nippon Maru.
Jesse pushes the stroller, with the Landmark hotel in the background.
Kat and Rebecca look at the gigantic fish in the tank outside a restaurant on Bashamichi.
Rebecca has no idea about baseball, but she quickly figures out how much fun it is to play with my Chunichi noisemaker sticks.
I walked into the stadium a little after 4pm, just in time for Dragons batting practice, and the first person I saw when I got near home plate was none other than my Morino! :)
Lots of people were swarming Tyrone Woods for his autograph, and I didn't want to be rude and push up against anyone. But, he was about to go past my group, and I didn't know what to do, so I did something desperate and underhanded and used my secret superhero powers to do something nobody else there was going to do: I talked to him. In English.
I leaned over and said, "Hey, Tyrone, think you'll hit a home run today?"
He looked up and smiled at me, and was like "Yeah! Well, I HOPE I can, I'm gonna try..."
"I hope you can too! It'd be great if you got the title."
"I don't know if they're gonna pitch to me, though," he said.
He took my ticket, laughed at my pathetic ballpoint pen, and said "I'm gonna use the meshi", and used someone else's nice permanent marker and signed my ticket with it!
I thanked him and wished him good luck, he thanked me too, and kept moving down the line of autograph seekers. I backed out of the crowd, with a gigantic grin on my face. A few people were saying things like "Whoa! Did you see that Tyrone was talking to that gaijin girl?"
I went up to my ticketed seat, sat down, and took a picture of the ticket in order to send it tothe2belo :)
The rest of these are forfirearmofmutiny, really:
Chunichi mascot Doala runs out onto the field with Yokohama mascot Hosshey.
Doala gets beaten up by the secondary Yokohama mascots.
Doala attempts to dance with the Baystars cheerleader dancing girls, who tell him to go away.
The only thing that kind of sucked about the game is that all of these people around me basically got up and moved to other sections, ostensibly not to have to sit next to the freaky gaijin. Well, ok, it was just the guy with the kid in front of me who kept standing on his seat and getting in my way so I couldn't see; he got the hint after a bunch of me muttering "mienai" really loudly, I think... and then the older couple sitting next to me who seemed more fond of the kid in front of us than they seemed fond of actually watching the baseball game. But, hey, on the other hand, that meant that by the 4th inning I had a whole bunch of space to myself to put my bag down and stretch out my legs, so, hey.
They did ALL of the chance music in the 9th inning (ie, two rounds of Nerai Uchi, two rounds of GOGO, two rounds of Uchimakure, and repeat until game over). It was pretty surreal. But Kroon held it together and the Baystars won. I blame the Dragons having FOUR ERRORS; in my eyes none of the Yokohama runs were earned.
jessed and katharos and their daughter Rebecca down to Yokohama to see Minatomirai and the stuff around there. I spent the afternoon hanging out with them, going up a tall building, eating okonomiyaki, wandering down Bashamichi. Then I went to the baseball game, where I wore my Dragons jersey and saw the Dragons lose, but something super-cool happened before the game - I got my first player autograph in Japan. Woohoo.I took 613 pictures for the day, though most were of baseball. Here's a few (mostly not baseball, mostly cute pictures of Rebecca. And bears! And Doala!).
The first place we went in Yokohama was the Landmark Hotel observation deck. Here is where I prove that I am infact the tallest person in Japan.
In the plaza, there was a Build-a-Bear Workshop. I'm sure Rumi and Fire would get a kick out of this. Strangely, they didn't have any NPB uniforms for bears -- just Yankees, Marines, Red Sox, Giants... pretty strange, huh?
This is the "Yokohama Teddy" that is specific to this store.
Here we are at the okonomiyaki place. Kat is trying to convince Rebecca not to eat out of an ashtray. (It was a clean ashtray, but still.)
Jesse and Rebecca on the steps to the walkway by the Nippon Maru.
Jesse pushes the stroller, with the Landmark hotel in the background.
Kat and Rebecca look at the gigantic fish in the tank outside a restaurant on Bashamichi.
Rebecca has no idea about baseball, but she quickly figures out how much fun it is to play with my Chunichi noisemaker sticks.
I walked into the stadium a little after 4pm, just in time for Dragons batting practice, and the first person I saw when I got near home plate was none other than my Morino! :)
Lots of people were swarming Tyrone Woods for his autograph, and I didn't want to be rude and push up against anyone. But, he was about to go past my group, and I didn't know what to do, so I did something desperate and underhanded and used my secret superhero powers to do something nobody else there was going to do: I talked to him. In English.
I leaned over and said, "Hey, Tyrone, think you'll hit a home run today?"
He looked up and smiled at me, and was like "Yeah! Well, I HOPE I can, I'm gonna try..."
"I hope you can too! It'd be great if you got the title."
"I don't know if they're gonna pitch to me, though," he said.
He took my ticket, laughed at my pathetic ballpoint pen, and said "I'm gonna use the meshi", and used someone else's nice permanent marker and signed my ticket with it!
I thanked him and wished him good luck, he thanked me too, and kept moving down the line of autograph seekers. I backed out of the crowd, with a gigantic grin on my face. A few people were saying things like "Whoa! Did you see that Tyrone was talking to that gaijin girl?"
I went up to my ticketed seat, sat down, and took a picture of the ticket in order to send it to
the2belo :)The rest of these are for
firearmofmutiny, really:Chunichi mascot Doala runs out onto the field with Yokohama mascot Hosshey.
Doala gets beaten up by the secondary Yokohama mascots.
Doala attempts to dance with the Baystars cheerleader dancing girls, who tell him to go away.
The only thing that kind of sucked about the game is that all of these people around me basically got up and moved to other sections, ostensibly not to have to sit next to the freaky gaijin. Well, ok, it was just the guy with the kid in front of me who kept standing on his seat and getting in my way so I couldn't see; he got the hint after a bunch of me muttering "mienai" really loudly, I think... and then the older couple sitting next to me who seemed more fond of the kid in front of us than they seemed fond of actually watching the baseball game. But, hey, on the other hand, that meant that by the 4th inning I had a whole bunch of space to myself to put my bag down and stretch out my legs, so, hey.
They did ALL of the chance music in the 9th inning (ie, two rounds of Nerai Uchi, two rounds of GOGO, two rounds of Uchimakure, and repeat until game over). It was pretty surreal. But Kroon held it together and the Baystars won. I blame the Dragons having FOUR ERRORS; in my eyes none of the Yokohama runs were earned.
no subject
That makes me mad. I've been unimpressed with the attitudes of a great many Japanese you report, though I take great care not to generalise this to all Japanese. I also believe my fellow Britons are likely no better in the counterpart situation.
Loved the photos and the autograph story!
no subject
I do get the feeling that if I was blonde and shorter and thinner, I'd probably have a lot less people acting the way they do, but hey, stereotypes are stereotypes.
You guys should come visit!