Fuzzy Math

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Kelly and I wandered around Yokohama with essentially no plans and no schedule all day on the first day.  At one point we returned to the ship – I put pictures on a flash drive to send back to my parents, and she had to make sure she had all her financial stuff in order for later in Japan.  We met a little bit later and decided to try to go to the observation deck at the top floor of a nearby building in the city.

 

So we walked over, and got a little lost on the way.  We stopped to watch a crew of three teenage guys doing some extreme flat-land bike tricks.  They were seriously good, although they kept pushing themselves out of their comfort zones and falling.  Of course you need to do that to get better, but they were always about an inch away from a serious injury.  I asked them if they spoke English, and they said no, not really, so I just said “Sugoi!”  I thought that meant “Awesome,” but it’s really more equivalent to “Wow,” which still works.  We walked on.

 

We were still a little lost, but it was warm and we were near the water so it didn’t really matter.  We ended up at a waterfront park, but decided to go lay on a grassy hill set back from the bank a little bit.  We talked about Kelly’s family for a little bit, and the strange plastic tree shaped like a number of fruit items stuck together that was to the southwest corner of the park.

 

Finally we went to the building with the sky garden, though we didn’t know exactly where it was.  We ran into a couple SAS’ers and asked them for directions.  We also made a stop at the Pokemon store and took some pictures of it.  Kelly looked around in it for a few minutes, but neither of us bought anything.  We found yet another group of SAS’ers (I think it was Zach S and Christine from Pitt) and asked them where to go again.  We looked for where they had told us to go, and eventually found an elevator and went all the way up to the 15^th floor.

That was definitely the wrong elevator.

 

We found ourselves in the somewhat small and drab office hallway of some companies we didn’t know and didn’t want to be near, and a businessman noticed us and realized we couldn’t be more out of place if we tried.  He didn’t speak much English, but he took us all the way to the entrance of the sky garden.  It was plush and luxurious there, with lots of diffused lighting with pinks and blues.  We got a ticket to go up.

This is where the fuzzy math comes in.

 

Supposedly the elevator goes up at 750m/sec.  I didn’t really believe that.  On the way down, I timed how long we were going 750m/sec (according to the speedometer on the elevator) at 4.13 seconds or so.  Assuming maybe I messed up and went too long, let’s cut it all the way down to 3 seconds to be extremely conservative.  That’s still 2250 meters in the air, or 6,750 feet.

We were not that high.

 

But it was still beautiful.

 

We took some pictures of the ship, and of the Ferris wheel, and the city in general.  We could see Mt. Fuji from one side.  There were gift shops and places to sit and rest up top, and different sides of the building had different themes.  One I think was underwater, one was romantic, etc. 

 

There was a vending machine on one side, and I had wanted some chocolate milk earlier, so I thought I’d look.  It was only like Y120, which isn’t a big deal, so I decided to try the drink in the machine that I thought was chocolate milk.  Once I pressed the button, a timer came up counting down until the drink was ready – it was about 25 seconds or so.  The door was apparently automatic and I was not supposed to touch it.  Right when the timer hit 0, the door opened up, and sitting in a paper cup without a lid on it was the drink I ordered.

 

Holy crap.

 

It wasn’t chocolate milk – it was iced coffee with milk and cocoa added – but it still tasted awesome, and was totally worth Y120 to get a drink from a vending machine in a paper cup.