There’s no mistaking the Yokohama skyline. Hundreds of YouTube videos and nearly a hundred hours of Yakuza: Like A Dragon gave me a relatively good idea about the layout of the city. We had to brave the legendary Shinjuku station rush hour crowd, but made it through without getting lost at all in that behemoth terminal largely thanks to the wife’s navigation skills and Google Maps.

Still, nothing prepared me the first step onto the street level.

Entering the street from the Queen’s Mall exit, the Ferris wheel clock looms large as I get my bearings. There are cars, but as is the case in Tokyo, they are mostly quiet on the roads.

The family had a mission to clear: the Cup Noodle Museum. Mine was just to try and get to Yamashita Park before it got dark.

I wasn’t expecting to be wowed by the Cup Noodle Museum, but I have to admit something about the thoughtfulness of the design and flow of the exhibits got through to me. It wasn’t so much about the cup noodles themselves as it was about the man behind the brand and his legend. It was free market fairytale storytelling at its best, but it is very hard to deny the appeal. We all walked out with a customized cup noodle, after all, why fly thousands of miles if you’re not going to participate in the rituals?

We reached Yamashita Park before the end of the day, but we had to skip quite a bit of the actual city and hit the train back to Shinjuku and onward to our hotel. What little taste we got of Yokohama was enough to whet the appetite. We will try to return. Till then, goodbye, port of the future. You truly deserve the name.