Fukuoka

The next stop on our journey was the city of Fukuoka. Fukuoka is the biggest city on the island of Kyushu, and the three of us Soo Jeong, Goun Ha (Soo Jeong's friend from Korea), and myself, made camp there for four days. During our stay we traveled the city visiting temples, museums, eating good food, shrines, temples, and shopping malls. We even got to go to a beach for part of the morning, but it was too cold to swim :(


For our lodgings, we mainly stayed at a youth hostel. The hostel was very cheap, around $20/night. It had a television room, a kitchen with free coffee, tea, etc., and free internet access. After exploring the city on foot almost everyday, it was nice to just sit in the kitchen with everyone, have a cup of tea or beer, play games, and plan out the next day's adventures. I highly recommend the hostel experience to anyone.



To talk about everything we did would take a lot of time, so I hope that the pictures will help to speed up the process a little.

The only picture taken at the Khaosan Fukuoka Hostel.


The next three photos are taken from the 13th floor of a building near the city's fish market. We had wanted to go to the market, but went too late in the day, so we were recommended to get a good view of the bay and surrounding city from this building.




This is a temple that Soo Jeong and I found on our walk back from the building with a view of the bay. It was beautiful, quiet, and I think that we were the only two people there when the photo was taken.

The robot park in Fukuoka was amazing. Always seeing programs on television or youtube about Japanese robots, I was curious to see what they could do, and at the Robot Square, I was able to do just that. They had everything from the small robots that clean your floor, to dog robots that are smarter than I am (it could take your picture, listen to your commands, and when you would pet it, it would react just like a real dog), and a seal pup modeled robot that was designed to help the elderly to feel less lonely.



Soo Jeong and Goun Ha at the one of the temples we visited. In the first picture, Soo Jeong is translating Goun Ha's fortune from Japanese into Korean. Some places have the fortunes in a variety of languages, but most commonly you find them in Japanese. The second picture, we were all taking pictures at the same time. It seems like a lot of my photos are of everyone else taking photos.

The weather in Kyushu is much warmer than here in Matsumoto, and we were all very surprised to see flowers and fruit trees in bloom. This photo was taken at a shrine.

Not nearly as magnificent as the tori gates in Kyoto, this small row of them in Kyushu was very beautiful.

A picture of some of the days catches being sold at a fish market. I have always been amazed when watching a show like Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, and seeing all of the strange things that you can find in a market. There were so many little sea creatures and fish that I was clueless about.