It was a guy thing

Yokohama, Japan It was a grey and rainy day, quite intense at times. So the agenda got reorganized around things that were inside, like the art museum. Great place to spend some time in inclement weather, right?

Wrong. For one of those unexplained reasons, the art museum was closed today, though it is open every other Friday of the year. Bummer.

We took a side trip in pouring rain to the hilltop area of the city where affluent Westerners built and lived before the war. From here, they could look down on Chinatown and other parts of the city. And look down they did.

There are numerous homes still standing and one was open today for a tour, the former official residence for the British Consul General, built in 1937. The staff were preparing for an event, and flowers were being arranged everywhere.

Must be a pretty place on a sunny day.

If you ask Don about the highlight of the day, the Hara Model Railway Museum would win hands down. Nobutara Hara turned his passion for railroads into the largest collection of model trains in the world. The displays are beautifully done, but made me think of what a 12-year-old boy who loved trains would create if money were no object.

First challenge, buy a ticket to the museum. One cannot purchase a ticket in the manned museum lobby. No, back on the first floor, across the hall, there is a Family Mart convenience store, in which there is a machine tucked away in a back corner where tickets can be bought. However, there are no English instructions. A very helpful clerk spent 20 minutes with Don, helping him navigate the very unfriendly — if not downright hostile — ticketing system.

Having persevered, we were able to enter the museum and began by admiring the small part of the total collection on display. You may recognize some of the trains.

Lots more individual carriages, but now for the fun part.

Why have model trains if you can’t run your own railroad? Mr. Hara went all out. His display is lit to move from day to night, and has so much to look at that it would require quite some time to take it all in.

And as if that weren’t spectacular enough, Don actually got to play conductor and drive his own train! Some of you will be very jealous.

We bid a sad farewell to this magic land of imagination and engineering and stepped outside to the huge corporate castles that surround this part of town.

We crossed the street to Nissan Global Headquarters and toured the latest full-sized adventures in mobility. Quite impressive. There are numerous high-end car showrooms in the area of all the other auto makers.

Not the day we had planned, but each day we continue to marvel at the style and energy of modern-day Japan. They get a lot of things so very right — except for the train museum tickets and sudden closings.

Don’s Food Corner

Staying indoors as much as possible, we were lucky to find ourselves in a vast mall connecting the subway line we were using to get to the hotel where we’re staying as well as serving the convention center and a few other huge hotels.

We got lost in the mall, of course, since it occupied several floors with criss-crossing escalators that looked like an Escher drawing. While we were kind of headed toward an Italian restaurant, we stumbled across a corner that was set up like an old Japanese street with small restaurants, all seeming to feature Japanese street food. We settled on one that only sold Japanese fried chicken — karaage.

For the uninitiated, this specialty features boneless chicken — breast or thigh — marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sake and sesame oil (although the marinade can vary). Then, it’s deep fried with an unusually light and crispy coating. The secret here is that they use corn starch for the coating, or mostly corn starch along with very little flour, if any at all.

Interestingly, in the last several years America’s Test Kitchen has been featuring more and more corn starch as a “breading” in their fried food recipes. It certainly lightens the coating and is easier to control without burning.

The restaurant we visited, while selling ONLY this style of fried chicken, had a variety of different sauces that could be poured on top of the chicken. We opted for just some simple tartar sauce, although this tartar sauce had little else besides mayonnaise.

Traditional accompaniment is a kind of cole slaw — or, at least, shredded cabbage with a mild mayonnaise poured on top. Rice is also an option as is miso soup, but not required.

The chicken was, as promoted, extremely juicy, flavorful and just perfectly crispy. We’ll be looking for this again.