Japan 2010: Fukuoka A (3/24/2010-3/25/2010)
I have these scans of this manga with a super moe manly man. In a maid outfit. I've been meaning to post them. It's one of the greatest manga series ever. EVER.
This post is filled with me posing with a lot of things. Consider yourself warned! Remember, Nur took the good pictures! Also minor swearing, fangirling, changing tenses, etc. 76 images.
So if you remember the EPIC ENDING of the last post, we were on the shinkansen heading south. Our destination? Fukuoka in Kyushu.
We found our hotel relatively quickly and dropped our luggage off. Our hotel looked out to one of the canals running through the city. They seemed to be cleaned it out, so we got to see some cool barges and equipment.
This far south the cherry blossoms were in full bloom and looking gorgeous.
This is the front of our hotel. It was fancy. Had a huge empty lobby that was kind of creepy, but it had a fancy feel to it.
A little down the canal was a bridge with lots of tulips. I figured that the Dutch were influential here or something, but when googling to find out, I just got a lot of info on Dutch soldiers in Fukuoka POW camps. It was just depressing. =( But these are pretty flowers.
That poor fish is so sad that it's pretty ugly.
Lovers of fine hair unite! THE FUKUOKA BRANCH OF THE DAVID BOWIE FANCLUB!
This was just a cool big tree with other plants growing off of it.
The canal is actually pretty shallow. Birds seemed to like to sit almost everywhere sand was visible.
This is Canal City. It's a mall. A DAMN nice mall.
It looks so nice! And they have a Baskin Robbins! And a Moomin bakery and cafe!
Malls around here are just so boring in comparison. There was a line to go into the H&M store here. People were IN LINE. TO GO INTO A CLOTHING STORE. THERE WAS AN HOUR+ WAIT. Craziness!
The real reason we headed over here. I mean come on, who wouldn't want to go to another Pokémon Center? Silly people, that's who. The golden discs on the left are actually life size Pokémon footprints. Further down they had a Groudon one. It was huge! The large Pokémon cut outs had sections to put your hand. When you did, they would say their name! And on the opposite side of the store, they had a wall with peepholes in it. Each one had a different scene set up with Pokémon figures! So cool!
Across the way was a Jump store! They had an Ao no Exorcist poster I wanted SO BADLY, but I figured I'd buy it later in the trip. I didn't. T^T
Next to the Jump store was an Ultraman store! This mall is THE BEST!
I'M A NINJA! Nin nin~
Glorious awesome stores. ♥
We walked around and found an arcade that had a ufo catcher with some Pokémon plush I had been looking for, so I funded the operation while Nur did all the real work. He's really good at ufo machines. He won an Entei plush fairly quickly and almost got a Raikou! Entei was the one I really wanted, so I was a happy girl. You're the best, Nur! =D
Near the arcade was this beauty. A slanted moving sidewalk. It's so people can take their shopping carts to their cars. And for me to run up the down side. It's a lot of fun. My great endeavor running up this was an inspiration to a group of Japanese school girls. YOU GO GIRLS! YOU KNOW WHAT'S AWESOME!! Seriously deliriously fun. It makes me want to go run up down escalators right now.
Walking back towards our hotel Nur spotted a Tamaya building. Being a retarded Oh! Edo Rocket fangirl, I not only had to take this picture, but I also had to post it. Oh! Edo Rocket is awesome and everyone should watch it.
I was very happy to be close to the/a red light district where we had a number of choices of clubs to visit.
This is the view from our hotel room. Pretty nice! =D
And the hotel room. Our collection of traveling friends is quite large. But they're all so cute!
More hotel room. It was a nice room. But we were just here to drop off some stuff and take a quick breather. Time to head out again!
DANGER! Go into the canal and THE KAPPA WILL DROWN YOU.
Where are we headed now?
YAHOO! DOME! It was time to get tickets for a baseball game. The home team here is the Softbank Hawks. There was a "Hawks Town" mall in front of the dome.
What is this? Seriously. What the hell is this? It's… I dunno. It's weird. Who thinks, "hey man, I want a statue of a giant golden hand giving a peace sign! And since we're the Hawks, let's put a hawk on a finger! Brilliant!"
Oh, that's right my friends. These are the SOFTBANK Hawks. Otousan is the Softbank Mascot. How can you not root for the team Otousan roots for? Unless they're going against the Hanshin Tigers, which are totally the best Japanese team. (Sorry Otousan.)
We went to the dome at the wrong time/day, because none of the ticket windows were open. Oh well, we'll return later. We have to buy bus tickets at Hakata Station anyway.
Bus tickets for a trip out of Fukuoka in hand (originally with the wrong date, but we got that fixed), we wandered around the station looking for a place to eat. We decided (more like Nur decided because I was like, "UHHHIDUNNO" the whole time) on a noodle place. I had curry udon. Which is amazing, btw. Then we went down a story or two (Hakata station is/has a building on top of it that's like… 8 stories.) and played in the arcade. Look at the movies the theater there was showing!
I don't remember which station this was at, but look how deep it is! That's FOUR flights of steps. Made me feel like a champ when I went up them.
Stuffs from the day. The Entei Nur won (Sethlans!), some Pokémon charms including a Lickitung line for Cubby (his favorite Pokémon), HEROMAN FLYER OMG OMG OMG EEEEEEE, A Heroman card EEEEEEEEEEEEE, some Squirtle stuff for my little sis, Nur's Lucario cloth, and some flyers and stuff they gave me at the Pokémon Center, and a Solanin flyer. I lettered Viz's edition of the Solanin manga, so the movie flyer was stupidly special for me.
Sexy Nur pose! Watching TV with our traveling friends.
We watched this AMAZINGLY COOL program on TV that night. There was this big European-looking town (I think it took place at Huis Ten Bosch.) and some 20 or 30 people had to run around and try to complete tasks and avoid being caught by these men in black suits. The longer you stayed safe, the more money you won. It was really neat. The "story" of the game had a king who needed stuff and the players would get it from NPCs in the area, or they'd help the NPCs do things… at one point pirates invaded the area, then some 30 men in black were unleashed. It was a REALLY awesome game. Like tag on steroids.
The next morning we just wandered around a bit and happened on Ankokuzan Shofuku-Ji, the first Zen Buddhist temple in Japan. And of course I'm a huge Life fan, so I thought about Charlie Crews a lot while on the temple grounds. Charlie would like the temple, I think. He totally zen. Okay, zen-ish.
The temple grounds were very pretty.
Hmmm… that bench seems… out of place. And where is it looking? At the tile storage?
Lots of neat roof tiles.
Somehow this just seems like it shouldn't be standing. =\
The top of one of the temple buildings.
The other temple building. Oh yeah, it was raining off and on while we were there. =(
I conquered one side…
…and Nur conquered the other!
There was a path in the back that lead to a number of other buildings, but the gates to those places were all closed.
The temple grounds were so full of life, and the trees all looked so neat.
Nur's also a stalker, stalking me around the grounds.
So I stalked him back!! Except stalking isn't very effective when done from the front.
We wandered around more and found this door. Where does it lead? I do not recall.
My stalking skills have improved slightly. We happened upon Tochoji Temple. They have two main objects of worship here: a standing statue of a thousand-armed Kannon and Japan's largest seated wooden Buddha. This temple was supposedly founded in 806, but a lot of it is in a modern-looking building. That big building just passed the gate? That's part of the temple.
Really neat roof and roof tiles on part of the temple that actually looked old.
Little fu dog!
Their pagoda was under construction.
I think the lettuce is a bit overgrown?
Japan's largest wooden seated Buddha! Nur took this, I didn't want to invoke the wrath of Buddha. Nur was, of course, just fine. No Buddha wrath for him.
We needed some shots of HEY LOOK A TEMPLE AND CHERRY BLOSSOMS OMG WE'RE IN JAPAN, and this was an ideal spot. The cherry blossoms here were very beautiful.
I sometimes have trouble with putting things into my mouth that shouldn't be there. But I actually like this picture. =3
That is where that big Buddha is.
I spy, with my little eye, a teeny tiny fu dog!
This is just a cool Subway sign.
Hey look! That's our hotel over there!
Nur spotted this building the previous day, so we decided to check it out. It was pretty cool.
Ultraman bad guy lemonade! It was pretty tasty.
Nur got Ultraman Cola.
We watched the workers in the canal do their stuff.
We even took video! YESSSSS! Right after I filmed this, the scuba diver (that's what that KUUUUSH KUUUUSH sound is, it's him breathing) stood up. The canal REALLY isn't that deep. Almost half his body was out of the water.
NO GIRLS. We don't like them and their girly parts. Ewwwww! Girly parts!
Fukuoka's subway system had these cute little symbols for every station.
The subway map with all the symbols. I like Gion's frightened running man.
I really like castles, so I wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to see Fukuoka Castle! This entrance was really pretty.
Castle moat!
The castle grounds had tons and tons of cherry trees in full bloom.
This place is 400+ years old, and the stairs are still in good condition!
Cherry trees EVERYWHERE!
That stone wall looks slipshod, but it's actually very stable. The stairs to the left of it? HUGE STEPS.
These are VERY steep steps. I almost had to climb hand over foot over them. Almost. but not quite.
Are all non-cherry trees in Fukuoka covered in other plants?
So I kept going up higher and higher on these castle grounds, wondering where they could hide a castle. I mean, these castles are usually visible from waaaay off. They're usually really big! I didn't realize there were only castle ruins until I was standing on the foundation of the donjon/keep. Oops! The castle buildings had been disassembled or moved after the abolition of the han system in 1871.
Just being on the foundation we had an amazing view of the surrounding city! Hey look! Yahoo! Dome is over there!
We left the castle and walked around the nearby lake. We saw this temple entrance and were awed by the size of the torii! Those pillars must be a good four feet around at least!
This lake was pretty damn big. We grabbed some lunch and made our way back to Yahoo! Dome to try to get tickets again.
This was in a bathroom stall.
This building looked like a big drill from the outside. Inside it was like some sort of resortish area. We wasted time at Hawks Town because it was raining.
It was time for dinner, so we went back to Hakata station again for dinner and watching people play games in the arcade.
And let's have the last picture of this post be some Eden of the East love!
Wanderings for the Day!
Next time: Takachiho Gorge!
This post is filled with me posing with a lot of things. Consider yourself warned! Remember, Nur took the good pictures! Also minor swearing, fangirling, changing tenses, etc. 76 images.
So if you remember the EPIC ENDING of the last post, we were on the shinkansen heading south. Our destination? Fukuoka in Kyushu.
We found our hotel relatively quickly and dropped our luggage off. Our hotel looked out to one of the canals running through the city. They seemed to be cleaned it out, so we got to see some cool barges and equipment.
This far south the cherry blossoms were in full bloom and looking gorgeous.
This is the front of our hotel. It was fancy. Had a huge empty lobby that was kind of creepy, but it had a fancy feel to it.
A little down the canal was a bridge with lots of tulips. I figured that the Dutch were influential here or something, but when googling to find out, I just got a lot of info on Dutch soldiers in Fukuoka POW camps. It was just depressing. =( But these are pretty flowers.
That poor fish is so sad that it's pretty ugly.
Lovers of fine hair unite! THE FUKUOKA BRANCH OF THE DAVID BOWIE FANCLUB!
This was just a cool big tree with other plants growing off of it.
The canal is actually pretty shallow. Birds seemed to like to sit almost everywhere sand was visible.
This is Canal City. It's a mall. A DAMN nice mall.
It looks so nice! And they have a Baskin Robbins! And a Moomin bakery and cafe!
Malls around here are just so boring in comparison. There was a line to go into the H&M store here. People were IN LINE. TO GO INTO A CLOTHING STORE. THERE WAS AN HOUR+ WAIT. Craziness!
The real reason we headed over here. I mean come on, who wouldn't want to go to another Pokémon Center? Silly people, that's who. The golden discs on the left are actually life size Pokémon footprints. Further down they had a Groudon one. It was huge! The large Pokémon cut outs had sections to put your hand. When you did, they would say their name! And on the opposite side of the store, they had a wall with peepholes in it. Each one had a different scene set up with Pokémon figures! So cool!
Across the way was a Jump store! They had an Ao no Exorcist poster I wanted SO BADLY, but I figured I'd buy it later in the trip. I didn't. T^T
Next to the Jump store was an Ultraman store! This mall is THE BEST!
I'M A NINJA! Nin nin~
Glorious awesome stores. ♥
We walked around and found an arcade that had a ufo catcher with some Pokémon plush I had been looking for, so I funded the operation while Nur did all the real work. He's really good at ufo machines. He won an Entei plush fairly quickly and almost got a Raikou! Entei was the one I really wanted, so I was a happy girl. You're the best, Nur! =D
Near the arcade was this beauty. A slanted moving sidewalk. It's so people can take their shopping carts to their cars. And for me to run up the down side. It's a lot of fun. My great endeavor running up this was an inspiration to a group of Japanese school girls. YOU GO GIRLS! YOU KNOW WHAT'S AWESOME!! Seriously deliriously fun. It makes me want to go run up down escalators right now.
Walking back towards our hotel Nur spotted a Tamaya building. Being a retarded Oh! Edo Rocket fangirl, I not only had to take this picture, but I also had to post it. Oh! Edo Rocket is awesome and everyone should watch it.
I was very happy to be close to the/a red light district where we had a number of choices of clubs to visit.
This is the view from our hotel room. Pretty nice! =D
And the hotel room. Our collection of traveling friends is quite large. But they're all so cute!
More hotel room. It was a nice room. But we were just here to drop off some stuff and take a quick breather. Time to head out again!
DANGER! Go into the canal and THE KAPPA WILL DROWN YOU.
Where are we headed now?
YAHOO! DOME! It was time to get tickets for a baseball game. The home team here is the Softbank Hawks. There was a "Hawks Town" mall in front of the dome.
What is this? Seriously. What the hell is this? It's… I dunno. It's weird. Who thinks, "hey man, I want a statue of a giant golden hand giving a peace sign! And since we're the Hawks, let's put a hawk on a finger! Brilliant!"
Oh, that's right my friends. These are the SOFTBANK Hawks. Otousan is the Softbank Mascot. How can you not root for the team Otousan roots for? Unless they're going against the Hanshin Tigers, which are totally the best Japanese team. (Sorry Otousan.)
We went to the dome at the wrong time/day, because none of the ticket windows were open. Oh well, we'll return later. We have to buy bus tickets at Hakata Station anyway.
Bus tickets for a trip out of Fukuoka in hand (originally with the wrong date, but we got that fixed), we wandered around the station looking for a place to eat. We decided (more like Nur decided because I was like, "UHHHIDUNNO" the whole time) on a noodle place. I had curry udon. Which is amazing, btw. Then we went down a story or two (Hakata station is/has a building on top of it that's like… 8 stories.) and played in the arcade. Look at the movies the theater there was showing!
I don't remember which station this was at, but look how deep it is! That's FOUR flights of steps. Made me feel like a champ when I went up them.
Stuffs from the day. The Entei Nur won (Sethlans!), some Pokémon charms including a Lickitung line for Cubby (his favorite Pokémon), HEROMAN FLYER OMG OMG OMG EEEEEEE, A Heroman card EEEEEEEEEEEEE, some Squirtle stuff for my little sis, Nur's Lucario cloth, and some flyers and stuff they gave me at the Pokémon Center, and a Solanin flyer. I lettered Viz's edition of the Solanin manga, so the movie flyer was stupidly special for me.
Sexy Nur pose! Watching TV with our traveling friends.
We watched this AMAZINGLY COOL program on TV that night. There was this big European-looking town (I think it took place at Huis Ten Bosch.) and some 20 or 30 people had to run around and try to complete tasks and avoid being caught by these men in black suits. The longer you stayed safe, the more money you won. It was really neat. The "story" of the game had a king who needed stuff and the players would get it from NPCs in the area, or they'd help the NPCs do things… at one point pirates invaded the area, then some 30 men in black were unleashed. It was a REALLY awesome game. Like tag on steroids.
The next morning we just wandered around a bit and happened on Ankokuzan Shofuku-Ji, the first Zen Buddhist temple in Japan. And of course I'm a huge Life fan, so I thought about Charlie Crews a lot while on the temple grounds. Charlie would like the temple, I think. He totally zen. Okay, zen-ish.
The temple grounds were very pretty.
Hmmm… that bench seems… out of place. And where is it looking? At the tile storage?
Lots of neat roof tiles.
Somehow this just seems like it shouldn't be standing. =\
The top of one of the temple buildings.
The other temple building. Oh yeah, it was raining off and on while we were there. =(
I conquered one side…
…and Nur conquered the other!
There was a path in the back that lead to a number of other buildings, but the gates to those places were all closed.
The temple grounds were so full of life, and the trees all looked so neat.
Nur's also a stalker, stalking me around the grounds.
So I stalked him back!! Except stalking isn't very effective when done from the front.
We wandered around more and found this door. Where does it lead? I do not recall.
My stalking skills have improved slightly. We happened upon Tochoji Temple. They have two main objects of worship here: a standing statue of a thousand-armed Kannon and Japan's largest seated wooden Buddha. This temple was supposedly founded in 806, but a lot of it is in a modern-looking building. That big building just passed the gate? That's part of the temple.
Really neat roof and roof tiles on part of the temple that actually looked old.
Little fu dog!
Their pagoda was under construction.
I think the lettuce is a bit overgrown?
Japan's largest wooden seated Buddha! Nur took this, I didn't want to invoke the wrath of Buddha. Nur was, of course, just fine. No Buddha wrath for him.
We needed some shots of HEY LOOK A TEMPLE AND CHERRY BLOSSOMS OMG WE'RE IN JAPAN, and this was an ideal spot. The cherry blossoms here were very beautiful.
I sometimes have trouble with putting things into my mouth that shouldn't be there. But I actually like this picture. =3
That is where that big Buddha is.
I spy, with my little eye, a teeny tiny fu dog!
This is just a cool Subway sign.
Hey look! That's our hotel over there!
Nur spotted this building the previous day, so we decided to check it out. It was pretty cool.
Ultraman bad guy lemonade! It was pretty tasty.
Nur got Ultraman Cola.
We watched the workers in the canal do their stuff.
Click to viewWe even took video! YESSSSS! Right after I filmed this, the scuba diver (that's what that KUUUUSH KUUUUSH sound is, it's him breathing) stood up. The canal REALLY isn't that deep. Almost half his body was out of the water.
NO GIRLS. We don't like them and their girly parts. Ewwwww! Girly parts!
Fukuoka's subway system had these cute little symbols for every station.
The subway map with all the symbols. I like Gion's frightened running man.
I really like castles, so I wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to see Fukuoka Castle! This entrance was really pretty.
Castle moat!
The castle grounds had tons and tons of cherry trees in full bloom.
This place is 400+ years old, and the stairs are still in good condition!
Cherry trees EVERYWHERE!
That stone wall looks slipshod, but it's actually very stable. The stairs to the left of it? HUGE STEPS.
These are VERY steep steps. I almost had to climb hand over foot over them. Almost. but not quite.
Are all non-cherry trees in Fukuoka covered in other plants?
So I kept going up higher and higher on these castle grounds, wondering where they could hide a castle. I mean, these castles are usually visible from waaaay off. They're usually really big! I didn't realize there were only castle ruins until I was standing on the foundation of the donjon/keep. Oops! The castle buildings had been disassembled or moved after the abolition of the han system in 1871.
Just being on the foundation we had an amazing view of the surrounding city! Hey look! Yahoo! Dome is over there!
We left the castle and walked around the nearby lake. We saw this temple entrance and were awed by the size of the torii! Those pillars must be a good four feet around at least!
This lake was pretty damn big. We grabbed some lunch and made our way back to Yahoo! Dome to try to get tickets again.
This was in a bathroom stall.
This building looked like a big drill from the outside. Inside it was like some sort of resortish area. We wasted time at Hawks Town because it was raining.
It was time for dinner, so we went back to Hakata station again for dinner and watching people play games in the arcade.
And let's have the last picture of this post be some Eden of the East love!
Wanderings for the Day!
Next time: Takachiho Gorge!