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!