Fukuoka City

A couple of weeks ago, the day after the typhoon, we headed to Fukuoka City to see the sights.

(Will wrote this one...you can probably tell from the lack of sense of humor...Serenity is much better at this type of thing.)

Taken from the train, you can see the vast expanse of rice paddies that separate us from the city - it didn't look promising - we thought we might be in for lots of rain.

But although the clouds looked menacing, it turned out to be a perfect day...one of the few that wasn't extremely hot and humid in August.

This is taken from the underground shopping mall that runs a few blocks under Fukuoka City. It's also the transportation hub between the subway and the train station. There are two aisles like this, next to eachother. Very easy to get turned around in any shopping mall.

This is looking at the heart of Fukuoka City on the Nakagawa (Naka River).

And this is us--same spot! Nice lady offered to take picture for us.

This is taken on the same river, but from the other end looking the opposite way...standing near the red and white signs in the center of the other photo.
This was called Canal City, which was basically a big shopping mall (very big...maybe five or six floors and dozens of restaurants. You can see there is still some traditional architecture throughout these cities, no matter where you are or how modern it is. This area had old homes/buildings next to the river.

This is some crazy prize. We think it's a hat. There was an entire store of the classic "move the claw around and try to grab a prize and drop it in the hole." You know, the kind that you never win...

But when we saw the stuffed turnips(?), we had to try. Threw six bucks down the tube trying to get one of these god-awful things.

Found a moment to rest in Canal city. We'd been walking all day...and this just happened to be right next to the "Desert Museum." Talk about lots of sweets...ice cream, crepes, just about anything you can think of. Pretty nice. We had a hard time deciding.

This was the crepe store in the Desert Museum that Serenity got a blackberry and ice cream filled crepe. As you can see, on the left you have a nice "bannana and ice cream/chocolate crepe," right next to the ever-popular "pizza sauce, cream cheese and tuna crepe." The Desert Museum lost my respect after trying to pass that off as desert. I found a nice "blood orange" sherbert instead.

This was looking down just some random alley in the city. Serenity liked the very small, old building among the high-rises.

This was a zen-garden type shrine...pretty common to find these stuck here and there in cities. This one was a nice moment of respite from a day of walking on pavement. Nice big coy fish in the pond, waterfalls, lots of little bonsai trees, pagodas and benches. Nice old man let us in right before closing time. It was free, too.

This was a "turtle pond" next to the gardens at a Shinto Shrine. There were dozens of these turtles in there, and they swarmed to you when you came up to the side of the pond, waiting for food and sticking their heads up at you.
There was another guy next to us, and a turtle crawled out of the pond and just kept crawling towards the guy. He literally had to move out of the way - this turtle must have been hungry. I had never seen a turtle chase someone before...

This is one end of the yatai stalls along the river. At dusk, these little wooden huts open up and serve ramen bowls and beer. Everyone shouts at you (no idea what they were saying) trying to convince you to sit at their stall (there must have been 15 stalls, at least).

This is the stall we choose, looking from our seat. We had ramen, and some other ambiguous looking meat-substance type things. (It's very hard to describe food here--most of the time I haven't the slightest clue what it is. It's often hard to guess if it's an animal or plant.)

Our stall - you can see the food in boiling fishy-smelling water...hard boiled eggs, fat-on-a-stick, other mysterious stuff. And what's that? - That guy sitting and eating there...why, it's a non-Japanese person! Very rare!

Our cook tossing something and frying something and straining something. They were busy guys...one to cook, one to wash plates, one to take orders...and one to stand in front and yell unintelligible Japanese.

Next post...the huge 14-inch purple earthworm-looking worm/snake thing!!!