Last week at school in Fukuoka

 On Monday, May 26,  I found out about a craft beer festival in Fukuoka, and in the evening I went to check it out. It was near the lively Akasaka region. It seemed a bit strange, but it was inside a plain empty room on the 2nd floor overlooking the lobby of a normal office building. When I got there, there was a line-up to get in, but it moved quickly. About 100 people. For about $40 you got some snacks and a cup. There were a dozen or so stalls a different craft beers from Kyushu and other parts of Japan.

I was the only non-Japanese person there. The fun thing was that after everyone had a few beers they were talkative and I got to practice more Japanese.

Tuesday was the first day of a calligraphy exhibit at the Art Museum. My teacher in Kyoto had told me about it and I went to see it. Over 100 pieces in this annual exhibition of selected works from around Japan. It was interesting to see not just the different calligraphy styles, but also the creative use of different sized characters on the same work, or unusual placement on the paper, or characters drawn in such a way that they resembled pictures of something.

On Wednesday I went for another run in Ohori Park.

On Thursday, May 29, the school organized a conversation group with local Japanese.

Friday was the last day at the school. For those leaving that week, there is a 'graduation ceremony' where we get a certificate and say a little speech. It must a bit strange for the teachers, every week saying goodbye to some of the people you've been having classes with for 3 hours every day.

When some people of a class are leaving that week, we take a picture of the class. Here is one from a couple of weeks ago, and one from this week.

After the graduation ceremony, a couple of us went for lunch. Then I just went back to the hotel to start packing, then out for a beer and dinner.

Third week of school at Fukuoka

 The third week in Fukuoka was May 19 to 25. As usual there is a 3 hour class every morning, Monday to Friday, and 3 days a week I have private lesson for 2 hours in the afternoon. The private lesson is mainly conversation practice.

Monday afternoon, the school booked a space for a barbecue party. It was at an interesting location: part of a rooftop parking lot that has been blocked off and filled with tables and bbq's. 

It seems popular, and our group from the school was over 15 people that took a couple of tables.

On Tuesday and Thursday after the private lesson I went for a run around Ohori Park.

Wednesday afternoon, in addition to the private lesson, the school organized a 'Kanji Marathon', in which each of the students chose a level (I chose N3). The marathon consisted of rounds of study followed by a quiz.

On Friday the school organized a trip for tea ceremony, or 'Chado'. It was about 20 minutes walk from the station. The building was part temple, part tea ceremony school, and part residence for the 3 generations of family that taught and performed tea ceremony.

First we saw the ceremony and we're served sweets and matcha tea.

Next we were each given a whisk and a bowl of tea and taught how to whip the tea into a froth.

The family seemed very happy to have us there and they showed us around the place and their beautiful little garden.

Friday evening I went for dinner with several other students.

Also on Friday, I moved to the next hotel, a couple of more subway stops from the school. It's actually interesting to stay in different neighborhoods of the city.

Saturday it poured rain. It was especially heavy in the morning and a bit lighter in the afternoon. In the morning I went to the Fukuoka Art Museum. Very interest works of Japanese artists in a kind post-impressionist or modern style. There were also several works of famous European and American artists. 

An interesting part of the gallery was called Shigenkai, which promoted local artists. Fukuoka has a program to promote the arts, called Fukuoka Next. I've also noticed several buildings of art studios around town, so it seems Fukuoka is an artist-friendly place.

Next to the art museum, in Ohori park, was an installation called Artist Cafe that was held in what looked like an old school. One of the exhibitions used strings of LEDs in a dark room to simulate falling rain, which was very cool.

Next to Ohori Park, in Maizuru Park, there was a curry festival going on that weekend. Despite the rain there was a fair number of people. I had a couple of dishes.

From there I took the subway a few more stops away from the center. I walked to Momiji Hachimangu Shrine.

From there, despite the weather, I walked to Momochi Seaside Park, which has a fairly large beach, beach house with showers etc., and large building on the water with restaurants, etc. It is also near the Fukuoka Tower. There were some young people playing volleyball. I can imagine how busy it must get on a hot day in summer.

I walked back to the nearest subway station and took the subway back to the Ohori Park area, and found a craft beer place nearby called B.R.E.W. where I had beer and dinner.

On Sunday it was cloudy but not raining, and after sleeping in a bit I took the train to a city about an hour away called Yanagawa. It is has canals all through the city and so is called the 'Venice of Japan'.

I had just arrived at the station in Yanagawa when I bumped into Samuel, another student at JaLs. He is from Hong Kong, and he was with a friend visiting from Germany. The three of us spent the day together in Yanagawa. We took the gondola boat ride along some of the canals, on a boat with about a dozen people. Beautiful views of the canals and the city, and under some very low bridges.

There were walking paths and little parks along the canals. Yanagawa struck me as a beautiful, very livable little city.

After the boat ride we walked around the town, mostly along canals, and stopped at the Mihashira Shrine.

Then we went to a restaurant for eel, for which Yanagawa is supposed to be famous.

Then the train back to Fukuoka. After we arrived I went my own way, and found a craft beer place near the station called Beerkichi, where I had beer and dinner.

Afterwards while walking to the subway station I passed a street musician - a young girl from Hokkaido who performed her own songs. Her name was Jun and she was so good I had to record some of it.

 

Second week of school at Fukuoka

A very busy week at the school and experiencing more of Fukuoka. There are classes for 3 hours every weekday, and I have private lessons for 2 hours 3 times a week. The day of the private lesson gets shifted around sometimes, depending o  activities organized by the school.

On Monday, May 12, the school organized a lunch at a rooftop garden restaurant in a building next to the station. There were at least 15 people or so, and it was a good chance to meet more of the students. The rooftop was very cool and offered some best views of the city I'd seen.

In the evening I went another part of town called Nakasu for the yatai, or food stalls. These yatai were on a walkway along a riverside, and seems to be the most popular area.

A cool thing about the yatai is that the spaces are small so you usually end up chatting with the other people. At one yatai there were Japanese and Koreans, and the Koreans spoke Japanese better than English, and we all chatted in Japanese, with a bit of Google translate, for a couple of hours. Really great time.

Something I found out while talking with students from Taiwan and people from Korea, is that the MBTI is hugely popular in Asian countries right now. Inevitably someone asks me what my personality type is (INFJ).

On Tuesday after class I walked around a bit. There is a huge mall called Canal City in the center of the city. I went to the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, which had works of contemporary artists from Japan, Korea, China, India, and Bali.

In the evening I went to an Engilsh language circle in the co-working area where the school is, for people studying English. They were thrilled to have a native English speaker there so it was fun.

Wednesday, May 14, in the evening the school organized a trip to the yatai in Nakasu. It didn't go late and I made it an early night.

On  Thursday after class I followed a pamplet I found called Art Walk, which described a route from the station to several small art galleries and cafes. There a couple of cafes called Goldflog, where I had a matcha milkshake and a hazelnut latte,  that were very cool spaces.

The walk also gave me different views of Fukuoka.

On Friday, May 16, I moved out of the apartment that the school had found for me,  and checked into a hotel. I didn't mind the fact that the apartment was very old and basic. The neighbourhood was underneath highway overpasses, and there was nothing there but cheap old concrete apartments and businesses. At first I didn't mind, but it got kind of depressing. The critical thing, though, was a very loud, intermittent mechanical noise in the building that went on all night and prevented me from getting a good sleep. After 2 weeks, I decided that in order to really enjoy the remaining 2 weeks in Fukuoka, I had to move.

I found one hotel for 1 week, and another hotel for the next week, and booked them. The first hotel was a little past the Tenjin area, and the adjacent area was very interesting and still the hotel was very quiet. 

On Friday evening I met up with another student, Mukund from the U.K., for dinner. We went to a very good, kind of high end, seafood restaurant called Fish Man, and the dishes were very innovative and very good. While we were there, a magician called Koki Hori came to our table and did an entertaining magic show for a tip - a bit unusual for Japan. 

On Saturday, May 17, I joined the school trip to Dazaifu, a famous shrine about 45 minutes outside the city. From the bus station there is a walk along a street full of tourist shops to the entrance of the shrine itself. 

The shine building itself was like many I'd seen the large garden area around it was especially beautiful.

From the shrine we walked to a nearby temple called Komyozenji with a rock garden.

Near the temple was the restaurant where we had lunch, in a beautiful traditional house.

After lunch we walked back through the shrine grounds and up the path to the Tenkai Inari shrine.

We spent the rest of the day at the Dazaifu Tenmangu Museum, which has displays and artifacts from different historical periods of the area. Then back to Fukuoka by bus.

In Fukuoka I walked back to the hotel. On the way, I passed one of the many British style pubs in Fukuoka and stopped for a Guiness.

I continued walking  through the area before I got to the hotel. It was quite lively. There were street performers playing a song I like from an anime movie. I had dinner at one of those conveyor belt sushi places.

On Sunday, May 18, some students had planned a day trip to a town called Tagawa, about 2 hours away, to catch a big festival. Some couldn't make it and one got sick, so it ended up being just two of us: myself and Anton from the Netherlands.

We met at the bus station Sunday morning and with help from a tourist information place we found the right bus to get on. It seemed the festival was not well known. The bus ride was long, stopping at many small towns along the away. When we got off at the city of the festival it was totally quiet, and we beginning to wonder if there was anything happening. 

After walking a while towards the river and asking a couple of people, we arrived.

The festival is called Kawawatari Jinkosai Festival, and has been going on since the 1500s. It involves 11 huge floats on wheels that are rocked and pushed and pulled across the river.  They start at the shrine grounds and one by one make their way to the river, with a lot of shouting and drumming and cymbal playing. Very, very festive.

The streets are lined with food stalls in true festival fashion.

After getting across the river the floats have to be pushed up a ramp on the other side.

Anton and I were there for several hours and it was a lot of fun. It was almost all local people there. It's surprising the festival is not more well known. One issue might be the difficulty in getting to the town. To take a train back to Fukuoka, we first took a very old diesel train to another small town for about an hour, and the regular JR train to Fukuoka, so it took a couple of hours.

We had dinner at a ramen place in the train station in Fukuoka. There's a section of the station full of ramen places. Then I headed back to the hotel.

First week at school in Fukuoka

Wednesday, May 9, I had class in the morning and private lesson in the afternoon. In the evening, I went to something I'd heard about called Yatai. There are about three areas in town where food stalls are set up on the main streets in the evening. Not just for a festival, and not some narrow market street, but every evening on the wide sidewalk of a major street. Some of the stalls are kind of famous, and there are tourist maps of the Yatai locations.

I went to the Tenjin area and at one of the stalls I had the famous Fukuoka tonkatsu ramen.

On Thursday afternoon there was an event through the school to practice zen meditation at a local temple. It was a good opportunity to sit inside the temple. About 10 of us went. There was a zen priest who gave a brief introduction, and after sitting there was tea and a snack in a other room.

On Friday the school organized a night at an Izakaya for dinner. There were about 8 of us and a couple of the teachers.

Afterwards we all went to Karaoke. There are whole buildings that are 8 stories tall or more, that have nothing but karaoke rooms. We stayed for a couple of hours singing a mix of English, Japanese, and  Mandarin songs.

This night was my first real social night with people from the school and it was a lot of fun.

Saturday and Sunday, May 10 and 11, were free days and I spent them exploring more of Fukuoka.

On Saturday morning I took the train to the Hakozaki shrine, on the east side of the city. The shrine was built in the 900s and rebuilt in the 1200s after the Mongol invasions. It is an important cultural location and it retains the weathered, old look.

Walking around the shrine I found the beautiful little Hakozaki Shrine flower garden.

From there I walked around some more, trying to find access to the waterfront, which looked on the map like it was not far. However almost all the area near the water in Fukuoka is industrial, so I had no luck.

I had lunch at a tiny, ancient ramen place run by one elderly man and the ramen was amazing. I joked with him a bit and he called it 'vintage ramen'.

Then I took the subway to Maizuru Park and the remains of Fukuoka Castle, west of the center of the city. The castle was built in the early 1600s. You can tell that it must have been quite extensive and a real defensive fortress, just by walking through the various foundations of the walls. In the little museum I found out that in those times, the mercantile area, near what is now Hakata Station, was called Hakata. The area of the the castle was where the Samurai lived and it was called Fukuoka.

There is one building that is still standing from when the castle was built. It was a storehouse.

Next to Maizuru Park is the large Ohori park. I went into the Japanese garden that is at one end of the park.

Next I walked around looking for a craft beer place on Google Maps. I ended up in an interesting area of narrow shopping and restaurant streets - the first I'd seen so far in Fukuoka. Really, sometimes I find the best areas in my search for craft beer.

Sunday was cloudy, and I took a bus to the western part of Fukuoka again, to a place called Fukuhama beach. It is one of the few places that has access to the water. Apparently it is famous for a large number of stray cats, but I only saw a few.

Next to Fukuhama Beach is Nishikoen Park, on a hill overlooking the bay. On other side of the park is the Terumo Shrine. It seems to have a small part dedicated to cats.

I continued down the other side of the hill and ended up at Ohori Park again. It is a popular recreation area with people jogging, working out at excerise stations, renting boats, etc.

At Ohori Park there is a well known Noh theatre. I went inside just to see if there were displays or something, but as soon as I opened the door I was quietly ushered into the theatre where a performace was happening. I stayed for a while just to experience it.

The rest of Sunday was just laundry, grocery shopping, etc.