I actually have a good excuse for not updating lately. I was on vacation! Dylan, a friend of ours and I all went on a week-long trip down to Kyushu and Yakushima Island last week. It was amazing.
Wanna hear about it? I sure hope so!
After school was over on the Thursday, Dylan and I hopped into the car and picked up friend. Dropped her off at the train station so she could get to Tokyo quickly to see some of her friends, then we drove to long, slow, toll-free way to Tokyo (if you take all the toll roads, it's about $40-50 to drive from here to Narita, not including gas). Then my adrenaline system got a work out when we navigated our way through Tokyo to pick her up. Oh goodness, that it one busy city with people who are all wanting to go somewhere and not thrilled to be stuck around the guy who is slowly trying to figure out where the heck he is. Stayed fairly panicked as we tried to find our way out of Tokyo. Finally, we found somewhere to stop the car to rest for a while. We had a wildly non-relaxing 3 hour sleep in the car, underneath some train tracks. It looked a lot like we just stopped in the middle of a road, but Dylan swears it wasn't and that in Japan they just pave underneath bridges. We then headed to the car parking place for 4 am before taking a shuttle bus and doing that whole airport/flying thing. Honestly, life was kinda a blur at that point. I was pretty tired.
Anyways, landed in Fukuoka and was half-dragged from the airport into the city, where we stored our bags in a locker at the train station and promptly bought some food and a cup of coffee for me (i.e. this is where I start remembering what the heck was going on). Then, we hopped on a train to Dazifu where we went to the amazing Kyushu National Museum. It was just chalked full of really impressive things from Kyushu going back as far as 1st Century B.C. and it gave a really cool look at the influence that contact with other cultures had on the tools and artwork. We learn so much about trade between Europe and North America in school, but I really didn't now anything about trade between Asian countries or Asia and Europe and the ways that that has shaped the world. I was way too tired to fully appreciate it. After that, we headed over to a huge Zen shrine that is famous for it's stone gardens, apparently. It was beautiful and we fed some ducks. Finished up there and headed back to downtown Fukuoka, where we picked up our bags and checked into a hostel for the night (and resisted the urge to plop down on the bed and never move again). Then got on yet another train and went to have dinner with Dylan's old host mom! It was lovely, but I didn't talk a lot. Mainly because she doesn't speak English and I don't speak Japanese. But it was nice just in that the last time we saw her was when everything was falling apart and we were about to leave Japan with no money. And now Dylan has a great steady job, obviously our visas are in order and we're making it work for us this time around. After dinner, we caught the last train back into the city and slept. Finally.
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| Dazaifu Shrine |
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| Doesn't he look so happy? |
The next day, we did a bunch of tourist-type things. We had breakfast at a cafe, did a bit of shopping. Oh, had some freakin' delicious tonkotsu ramen for lunch (where the
broth is made from pork bone and very popular in Kyushu, instead of
broth made from soy sauce which is much more popular almost everywhere
else). We toured around a bunch of shrine and temples (including what is believed to be the first Zen temple in Japan), went to a tea house. And we past by this tourist-type place where there was a women weaving and you were allowed to try it out, so of course Dylan gave it a try and was adorably excited. We were going to have dinner at the street stalls that Fukuoka is famous for, but after wandering around for a long time and not finding any (we guess they weren't there either because it wasn't really tourist season anymore or because it was raining), we gave up and had dinner at some neighbourhood restaurant.
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| Zen Temple, completed in 1195 |
We woke up early the next morning and headed off to Nagasaki. But this is already really long, so I'll continue later. I'm thinking that I'm gonna manage to break 8 days into 3 different posts, because I'm magical like that.
