Our last day in Japan :(

  Fukuoka, Kyushu-Okinawa, Japan
Wednesday, April 1, 2009

We had a nice slow start to the day and left the lovely J-Hoppers Hiroshima at 11am. We hopped on a tram and had maybe the easiest journey so far, picked up our bullet train tickets and boarded the train to Hakata station, Fukuoka - in the south of Japan. The main reason we have come down to Fukuoka is to get the flight to Taiwan, and we didn't plan in any real sight-seeing time here. We decided to relax after all the walking around seeing amazing things and once we had found the hostel (which involved a little back-tracking and a stop for lunch!) we set out for a wander to get some ice-cream and some beer.

Fukuoka is a modern city, although we didn't have time to venture into the centre, we found a lovely park with a cherry blossom walk and lots of slightly drunk parties of Japanese having picnics. The park also contained a baseball field, with a team of young boys - maybe 5-10 year olds, practicing throwing. We walked back to the main station and found a little cafe to have an ice-cream, not much English spoken here, so we had some fun pointing at things on the menu. Then we found a bowling alley and had 2 games - much to the amusement of the staff ! There was a beer vending machine and I won the first game, Paul won the second, which worked out very nicely. It's not the same as Wii bowling at Dan and Jojo's with an audience everytime a 44 goes by!

Finally we stumbled onto a really nice bar called Beer Cafe 7 - again no English spoken but we ended up with 2 beers, some deep fried pumpkin and a pizza = just what we wanted !

The hostel was a bit poor - our first night in Japan was pure luxury, so maybe it's fitting that we end it a bit more down to earth, but this place was cheap - we had bunk beds !! and our room obviously used to be twice the size and had been split in half with some chip-board. The internet connection was weak - but we still managed to sing Happy Birthday to my Mum on Skype - Happy Birthday Mum !!
Tomorrow ... Taiwan !