Choosing fast and cheap over high-end chic in Yokohama

A Chinese temple at Chukagai. Photo by Ko Sasaki for the New York Times

Customized cup noodles

The best part of the museum? For 300 yen, you can make your own customized Cup Noodles to take with you. First, you decorate the distinctive red and white Styrofoam containers at art stations outfitted with special markers; next, you choose your broth (seafood, curry, original flavor) and toppings (oddball options include dried cheese chunks and tiny Tweety Bird wafers). Finally, you can observe the entire shrink-wrapping process through a series of giant factory windows and insert your made-to-order creation in an inflatable bag to wear around your neck (don't ask).

You can also make ramen by hand in the adjacent Chicken Ramen Factory, but it costs another 500 yen and requires reservations for at least two people. Instead, I paid a visit to the noodle bazaar on the factory's top floor, which approximates a pan-Asian night market: numerous booths dish out snack-size helpings of Kazakh lagman, Lanzhou beef ramen, Thai tom yum goong noodles and Malaysian laksa (as well as Italian spaghetti), each for 300 yen. My favorite was the Vietnamese pho, the rice noodles served in a bowl of simple, clear broth and brightened with lemon grass and chilies.

This international taste tour is fitting for Yokohama, whose districts with significant foreign influences and history - like the hills above the Motomachi neighborhood, south of the harbor, where the British and French set up their diplomatic missions and ornamental gardens - still host expatriate populations today. Motomachi shares a subway stop with Japan's largest Chinatown, Chukagai, a wildly popular tourist attraction among the Japanese, with inflated prices to match.