Friday 22nd January, Fukuoka

Today we headed to Fukuoka on the Shinkansen. We got up early so that we would be in time for the 10:03 train from Tokyo station. We had to change trains at Osaka to get all the way to Hakata station in Fukuoka where we arrived at 4pm.

The trip from Tokyo to Osaka was annoying – lots of people were getting up and down. Japan Rail pass holders are not allowed to take Nozomi shinkansen, which are the ones that only stop at major cities. The Hikari shinkansen makes a lot of little stops and lots of the people on it were going to or coming from one of these smaller stops. So it’s a busy train.

The highlight of the trip was through the mountains after Nagoya – the towns and tea farms along the shinkansen line were all covered with snow. It was very pretty and Christina nearly died of excitement. Despite our pleas, nobody else wanted to stop for snow-frolicking so we had to stay on the train.

Finally in Fukuoka, we went directly to our ryokan, the same one we had stayed for one night in 2008. It’s a lovely place, the building is old and in traditional Japanese style, our room is big, includes a kotatsu (heater table) and has a view of their little traditional garden and only cost us 7500 yen in total. We don’t get our own bathroom, but the ryokan has a big bath that I like using anyway.

We had a brief sleep under the kotatsu and then HIT THE TOWN which is within walking distance. The first stop was the giant mall called “Canal City”. It’s a nice walk which we had done before, through a temple and then through elevated walkways to the mall. We wandered for a while and found a basement full of character shops. Chrissy found a “Swimmer” shop (her favourite) and I had to leave her there for about half an hour while she pored over flowery wallets etc. I went and looked at capsule machines and won a “nintea” ninja figure representing apple tea. The pun apparently is: “Nintea, Let’s enjoy after’nin tea”.

After I rescued Chrissy from Swimmer we left Canal City and found the real canal which we hadn’t seen yet. We saw some yatai which are little portable food stalls. They have a bar with little seats around and clear plastic walls hanging from their roof. We were invited in by their cooks but we wanted to walk first. We walked up a main street of town in the Tenjin area and found a giant bear and small bears full of bottle caps. On the way back I wanted to eat ramen, Chinese style noodle soup. We found a yatai which said “ramen” (lucky we can read Japanese) and went in. It was empty and the two guys running it were a bit silent but we ordered our ramen anyway. IT WAS DELICIOUS. Amazingly ridiculously delicious.

After ramen we walked home through canal city, pausing to watch the giant fountain. Back at the ryokan we had our first proper Japanese bath and now we feel all warm with our feet under the kotatsu.