Needless to say, it was first on our minds when around April or May my friends and I decided to make a little excursion to Japan’s southern paradise (to be clear, the one that’s not Okinawa). It wasn’t long before our ‘Fukuoka fantasy’ became reality, and before we knew it we were the proud owners of a stack of tickets to and around the island of Kyushu. Risk-taker that I am, I took a day off work to extend the trip to an unheard-of three--count 'em--three days. The tickets were actually a really good deal. All-you-can-ride rail pass anywhere within western Japan for three full days (including express and bullet trains) all for the low, low price of 16,000 yen. We pretty much woulda spent that much or more just getting there.
The morning of the 13th, I got up around the time old people in my neighbourhood usually have lunch (6am), packed my bag and met up with Shima, K, and Daniel at the train station. Sleepy but excited, we boarded our Osaka-bound train and met up with Tomoko, who had come directly from Kanazawa through Kaga. 15 minutes into our 5-hour journey and cameras (many of them brand new) were already flashing, ipods were out, and my new-used gameboy was being passed around like a cheap wh-…item. Impressively, Shima, who none of us thought was gamer material, beat Super Mario Land like it ‘wudn’t no thang’ before we even reached Kansai.
When we finally arrived at Hakata Station, our first order of business, understandably, was to wolf a couple bowls of ramen, which we accomplished without delay. That done, we wandered the already-scorching-hot Fukuoka streets in search of our hostel, which actually turned out to be pretty nice. We then proceeded to devote the rest of the afternoon to exploring Momichi, where Fukuoka’s Yahoo! Dome, Fukuoka Tower, Hawk’s Town, and some impressive beaches are located. I’ll be the first to admit that we lost a lot of time goofing around and taking ridiculous group pictures every couple of minutes (the same can really be said for the next two days as well), but no regrets from where I’m standing. It was time well spent.
After a celebratory beer at Hard Rock Café, it was time to head to Tenjin, Fukuoka’s downtown core, where I met my old host family and the Kaga group split up for a little while. My family and I headed to this great yakiniku place, where we gorged ourselves on savory meat and the odd vegetable. In classic form, and with my friend Alex’s help, dinner was spent ribbing my host sisters, which not surprisingly came back on me pretty quick.
Although it would have been great to spend more time with the surrogate fam, Maki, Alex and I rejoined my Kaga homies and cut loose until about 3 or so before stumbling back to the hostel. The next morning, we got up around 9-ish, and went to the station to catch the next train to Nagasaki. Amazingly, I found out my high school friend Paul had just moved there, so I was pretty excited to see him and check out his neck of the woods. I actually really enjoyed the city—we didn’t have time to see that much, but the weather was exceptionally good and Nagasaki had a cool, kinda cultured air to it. Everyone says it, but I’ll just reiterate that there’s virtually no sign that the city was ever leveled by an atomic bomb.
We strolled through Glover Garden, took the tram a bunch of times, and then meandered through the streets before going to the A-bomb museum and Peace Park for a sobering dose of history. I find that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki feature museum exhibits that are a fair bit more graphic than they would be in the West, but I guess that comes with the territory—no one in the West can claim to have had two major urban centers nuked. After catching up with Paul and seeing some of the sights, we had dinner and then took the train back to Fukuoka. We checked into a sweet new hotel that Shima booked for us and then headed back off to Tenjin for night out numero dos.
The next morning was maybe the most difficult to get going, and Daniel and Tomoko actually ended up leaving the hotel before the rest of us. Another perfect day, we went to Canal City for a bit of shopping and ramen for brunch. There’s a Cold Stone ice cream store that I particularly enjoy, mainly because the staff working the counter will burst into song on request. Yet, because of some inexplicably perceived connection between show tunes and swine flu, they weren’t offering their singing service that day. There was just enough time between bites of delectable ‘fudge devotion’ to feel a little disappointment.
My elder sister, Sayuri, met us at the mall and, while Shima, Daniel, and Tomoko made their way to Dazaifu Temple, the rest of us headed to Tenjin for an hour or two. While there, we spotted a poster outside a clothing store that, from a distance, was the spitting image of Daniel. Upon closer inspection it still looked a hell of a lot like him--> hat, blue shirt, beard—the works. With precious little time to spare before our rapidly approaching train home, K and I bid Sayuri goodbye and took a cab to one of Fukuoka’s most famous parks, Ohori Kouen. In the center is a large pond, and one look at the swan-themed paddle boats was enough to simultaneously convince us both that it was time to paddle-boat-race around the pond.
After getting off our short-lived ride, I popped into a convenience store to buy a drink, at which point the old man running the place moved hastily into the back room to retrieve something. When I went up to pay, he asked me if I spoke any Japanese, and when I said, “yeah, a little” he asked if I wouldn’t mind translating a sign for him from Japanese to English. So I got to do this guy a good turn while virtuously promoting cross-cultural exchange/internationalization AND I got a free Coke out of it. A sweet deal, it was. K took a picture of us holding the completed sign to commemorate the occasion and then we high-tailed it back to Hakata Station for the long trip home.
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