Out on a School Night

Last night, SMS and I went out on a mid-week field trip.  Even several years after school has wrapped up, I still love the slightly verboten feel of doing something fun on a "school night."  Of course, when we were heading home around 10 and I saw a group of seemingly high school age kids, I was pearl-clutchingly outraged that they were out so late.  Don't they have homework?!  Don't they need to sleep!?!  Of course, they were probably college-aged kids and really, their night was just beginning.  As I get farther away from high school and college, it's borderline shocking to me how young they look.  Did I look that young?!? [Yes, even though I felt oh-so-mature and worldly.]

Flamingos don't care about a little rain!

So, I wanted to go to the Yokohama BayStars game last night.  Rain was set at 75% chance for game time, but that means it's 25% not going to rain, right?  While my grasp of percentages may be irrefutable, rain will have its way and it was raining pretty hard when we arrived.  We didn't have our best rain gear and we didn't want to pay to sit through intermittent sprinkles so we decided to take a rain check (Ha, ha!  I slay myself sometimes!).

The rain did pass over, which we thought it would since the clouds were moving in a Yokosuka to Yokohama direction and things had cleared when we left home.  We walked around Yokohama for a bit before deciding to head to Landmark Tower for dinner.  We had seen a cute yakiniku place over the Winter that I've really wanted to go back to so off we went!

Landmark Tower dominates the skyline of Yokohama.  It's the tallest building and looks vaguely ominous, like a bad-guy Transformer or the building in Ghost Busters.  Please note that architecturally, it looks nothing like the building in Ghost Busters but it feels like something bad is going on.  Someday, I'd like to take the elevator to the top but last night was about the food.  We walked over to the Dockside Garden elevators, which are accessible on level 1F of the main tower.  We took the elevator down to B2F and went to Yakitori Aburi Sumiyaki Odori.

Chicken meatballs!

There are several cute tables with orange stovepipe vents above them but since there were none available, we sat at the counter.  We ordered lotus chips, a delicious lettuce wrap with perfectly seasoned chicken, a grilled rice ball (yakionigiri), grilled chicken strips, grilled eggplant and an order of chicken meatballs (tsukume).  The chicken meatballs were awesome because those were cooked on our own little hibachi grill.  They were delicious and I'm glad we ordered one thing we got to cook ourselves!

Our cute "toppings" plate.  It was cuter before we started decimating it!

The lotus chips were delicious although slightly over salted for SMS' taste.  The grilled chicken strips were something I was initially leery of since the photograph featured a lot of chicken skin on the strips, but it did look pretty delicious so SMS ordered it.  He was right!  The grilled eggplant was sliced length-wise and had a surprise meat patty placed in the middle.  I didn't mind (because it was delicious!) but it would be hard to be vegetarian in Japan.  Several dishes seem to follow the "Use meat as a seasoning" guideline that I've heard in America when people are advocating for reduced meat consumption.  I've seen tofu dishes with ground beef in addition to last night so be careful, all you vegetarians out there!

View from the 'Gicho!

After dinner, we headed towards Sakuragicho which wasn't the most direct route home, but it feels very vibrant and it was something different to see so we took the moving walkways over to the station.  Ok, ok, we took that route because of the moving walkways.  So lazy!  So lazy, in fact, that we decided to fortify ourselves with the driest chocolate cake at a small cafe before heading on the train.  It's all about conserving strength!