September part 2 - Fukuoka is not a dirty word

This half of the September updates won't be so wordy I think, not as much drama happened on this trip.

As I said in the last post, there's two consecutive long weekends in September, so most of the stuff that follows is about the second long weekend trip we took, to Fukuoka.

Here's a map to give you an idea of where we are, where Kyoto is and where Fukuoka is.


View Home, Kyoto, and Fukuoka in a larger map

When we did the Kyoto trip, we took the Shinkansen and it was a little under 3 hours to arrive from our starting point.  Fukuoka's a touch further away, it would take almost 6 hours, and we would arrive close to midnight.  We flew instead and cut our trip down to 2 hours and saved ourselves a lot of money too.

Here's something that Fukuoka is famous for:

Hakata ramen is pretty much the best thing in the world.  In moderation.  We ate it once while we were in Fukuoka, but thought we'd save ourselves a bit of indigestion and try out what else Fukuoka had to offer.  This ramen was bought at a place called Ramen Stadium in Canal City.  There were a lot of ramen restaurants there, but I think we made the right choice.

Fukuoka is a coastal city, with canals within the city limits and islands off the coast.

Here's some photos of the canals (click for a closer view):

The canals run alongside an area called Nakasu, an inland island district of Fukuoka that serves as the red light area.  From around 5.30 or 6.00 pm food stalls called "yatai" are set up alongside the canals in this area where you can get ramen, yakitori and other street eats.

We were pretty bad with our timing here, arriving too early for dinner and having had a pretty late lunch.  We didn't eat here, but we took some photos.  Here's one!

Fukuoka's a pretty laid back city, with a good nightlife.  Unfortunately maybe a day and a half into our trip my lower back started doing some weird things like seizing up and crippling me with pain, so I wasn't often up for late nights out.  We did some daytime sightseeing instead and took a day trip out to an island called Nokonoshima.

If you decide to do this trip, do some research beforehand so you know where to go.  I thought I knew, turns out I didn't, we took two taxi trips to figure out how to get to the ferry terminal.  Got there in the end, so our story has a happy ending.

Please enjoy the photo narrative of our trip that follows:

JOURNEY

Nokonishima Island Park

Rabbit/goat enclosure (yes, really)

Memory lane

The view over the water before leaving the island

AND THEN

The same day, we took a bus outta there and went to Robosquare.

And here are some robots we saw while we were there.

The last robot in the series above had a treat in store for us.  We were there a little before 4.30 pm, so we managed to catch the last robot performance of the day.  I'll let his dance close this blog post.  Enjoy his smooth moves to Kraftwerk.

P.S. More Fukuoka shots here!

September part 1 - sightseeing, typhoon and flash-flooding

NOTE: This post has LOTS of photos, so some of them are quite small.  Click on them for a bigger view.

September was almost as busy as May for us, with a little bit of drama thrown in for good measure.

There were two consecutive long weekends in September because of national holidays on a Monday, so we took advantage of the chance to see a bit more of Japan on our days off.

We had been to Kyoto before, on a day trip from Osaka, but we decided to do it properly this time.

On the 13th we headed out to Kyoto on the shinkansen, and spent the weekend sightseeing, and eating.  We tried to do a day trip to Nara, but my bright idea to jump on the train earlier than the one we had planned wasn't so bright after all.  We ended up in a town called Yagi, and although we tried to find something to do, there was nothing much we could do without car access.  We got a coffee at Mister Donut and decided to head back to Kyoto.  We'll have to go feed the deer another time.

Here are some photos from our Kyoto trip, before the drama hit:

Sanjusangendo temple grounds

 

Sanjusangendo is famous not just for the beautiful grounds, but for what's inside the large temple hall (top left).  The main deity in this temple is the thousand armed Kannon, and there is a giant statue of this Kannon within the temple grounds.  Surrounding the Kannon statue is one thousand life-sized (person-sized) Kannon statues, and it was truly amazing to be in the same room as all of them.  The scale was something I couldn't really picture before we went through, and it was pretty damn humbling to see the amount of work that had been put into something so beautiful.  There are no photographs allowed inside the temple, so I can't show you any from inside.  Here's the wikipedia link for the temple.  This temple was Jason's pick for sightseeing, it was a real winner.

Area around our guesthouse

Our hotel was walking distance to the Heian shrine, the entrance is in the picture above.  More photos of this later in this entry.

We went out to Gion on our second night in Kyoto.  Gion is the area that traditionally was known for geisha and teahouses.  Both are still around, but unsurprisingly, not in the same quantities as in the past.  We spotted one geisha on her way to another engagement in the evening.  The whole area is magical, and I'm glad we visited at night.  It was like being transported to another time.

Okay so when we went to Gion, we soaked up the ambience, and we sought out a restaurant which only served chicken.  Chicken in as many different configurations as you can picture in Japanese cuisine.  We found it, and it was so great, so here's some photos.

Chicken gyoza dumplings (chicken skin wrappers)

Yakitori skewers - chicken hearts (much nicer than it sounds)

Yakitori.  Left - chicken livers and chicken breast meat.  

Right - chicken gizzards, chicken skin and chicken thigh meat.

1/4 serve of their chicken ramen.  The broth was chicken based, and so rich it was amazing, topped with noodles, scallions and roasted chicken.  Awesome.

Yakitori.  Left - chicken tenderloin.  Right - chicken thigh.

Kyoto has some really lovely food.  On our last night (so we thought), we went to a restaurant near our hotel, opposite the Heian shrine and got ourselves a kaiseki set of different dishes.  It was nice.

It was pretty rainy that night, and a typhoon was forecast, so it was good we found a place so close to the hotel.  We settled in that night to the sound of steady rain on the roof.  During the night we were woken twice by emergency alerts on our phones.  I could make out the kanji for "heavy rain" and all I could think was "well, yeah, we know", before drifting back off to sleep.

The next morning we had a few hours to kill before our shinkansen back home, but it turns out the typhoon rainfall had flooded the Katsura river in Kyoto, bursting its banks.  We watched the news in the hotel restaurant over breakfast and saw footage of shinkansen delays from Osaka to Tokyo.  

"OH BOY", we said.

We decided not to panic until there was something to panic about, so we went and had a look at the Heian shrine near the hotel and wandered around the area until it was time to head to the train station.

This river didn't look like this the day before.

It was still pretty wet that morning, so we didn't really have much company along with us at the shrine.  There was this guy.

But not many others.  This meant that the real highlight of the shrine, the Japanese garden and lake, was almost deserted.  Gardeners were already sweeping up the damage and mess from the typhoon the night before.  Here are some (lots of) photos:

        

After our last morning of sightseeing, we decided to go to Kyoto station and see how badly the trains were messed up.  We walked to the subway and found that the whole of the Kyoto subway network was out of service, so we trudged to a bus stop, then gave up on the bus and took a taxi.  The taxi driver knew the route very well and got us to the station in no time.  

When we got to Kyoto station, we saw this:

We figured we might be in for a long night.  I checked at the information counter and got told that the Shinkansen between Shizuoka and Shin-Yokohama was completely out, because a major river had burst its banks.  We were welcome to go to Shizuoka and try to find accommodation for the night, but apparently the station was mobbed and our chances would be slim.  We got in line with the others and after an hour were able to exchange our tickets for one of the first trains out in the morning, presuming that the tracks would be fixed by then.  The lady at the counter didn't seem too optimistic about that.

Straight after we got the tickets sorted out, we found a place for lunch, I used my mobile to find a hotel near Kyoto station and reserved a room, and we settled into Kyoto for one more night.  When we woke in the morning and check the JR site, trains were back up and running on the Shinkansen tracks, so we were set to go.  Jason headed into work, but by the time I got close to home it was too late to teach my classes, so I stayed home.

Kyoto is lovely.

Here's some more photos.