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.