Japan Adventures: Fukuoka

Hello again from Japan! We've had such an amazing trip thus far, and I'm so thrilled to share more of our adventure with y'all - this time, from the other end of the country!

Fukuoka

Tuesday, May 14

We got a reasonably early start so we could make our flight to Fukuoka from Haneda airport! We had our stuff pretty much entirely packed the night before so we could speedily check out and buy breakfast from the hotel bakery. The food was delicious yet again and helped us get to a good start.

And we needed it! We each had a big suitcase, a carry on suitcase, and a huge backpack, which we had to drag to the pickup for the airport limosine. Like the one we took from Narita airport, this bus travels directly between hotels and airports! We caught the bus by the skin of our teeth, and arrived at Haneda 1.5 hours before our flight. I would have liked to explore the airport and find the Pokémon vending machine, but we opted to get lunch instead, so we got some yummy bento. We were probably the only non-Japanese on our flight!

The flight was both easy and gorgeous; we flew over Japan and got to see its forested mountains. From above, it looks like a green velvet blanket, with grey-brown veins branching out in the deepest folds where cities nestle in the valleys.

When we arrived in Fukuoka, it was just a train ride to the JAL CIty hotel, which was super fancy and nice, though the room was small and the view was an exciting cement wall. But you couldn't beat the convenience - we were so close to all these restaurants!

It was 4pm and we were starving, so we attempted to go for conveyer belt sushi nearby. Unfortunately, the place was closed, so we wound up going to Shin Shin, a local ramen place recommended by friend of the stream and ramen king, TabetaiCooking! There was blessedly no line, and we ordered the specialty ramen and gyoza, which were beyond delicious.

On our way back to the hotel we had to stop by Mandarake, a secondhand anime collectors store. Miss_Editor found a figure from an obscure old anime she likes to help complete her collection, talk about luck!

We rested in the hotel, then decided to try and make it to the Sanrio Dream!ng Park and Fukuoka Tower. It wad quite a jaunt over there, including a bus that took the highway over the bay. We arrived half an hour before closing at Sanrio, which was mostly a store with some AR activities and photo OPs. We spent way too much money on merch and got some cute photos, and after paying we were given tiny stickers to vote for our favourite characters!

It was dark by the time we got to Fukuoka Tower, a huge observation tower that Miss_Editor insisted was beautiful at night, and she was right! It was mostly other couples going up the clear elevator with us, and it wasn't too busy up at the top. I got to participate in my first little stamp rally by "finding" local buildings and their adjascrnt stamps. Afterwards, I got a fortune up top.

We finished the evening by searching out dessert, and we worked together to find a little cheesecake place tucked away in an alley, down a path and up some stairs. All day we hadn't really seen other North Americans, and this was no exception! We had delicious chocolate and lemon cheesecake, and when we tried to pay with a 2000 yen bill, the server stopped us and used Google translate to explain it was a rare banknote! Very sweet of him.

Before heading to the hotel, we finally remembered to stop at a 711 to get breakfast for the following morning. While I desperately tried to get exact change, the cashier asked why we were in Fukuoka - "Tokyo better" he said! We said Fukuoka was great, and he asked where we'd eaten. We said Shin Shkn and he asked what we thought - I emphatically said it was great, and he seemed thoroughly disappointed! Ah well, it was special to us!

Wednesday, May 15

We decided to start the day with the first livestream of the trip! We started outside the 711 and took breakfast pan and chat to Maizueu Park, where the peonies were in bloom. We found a spot in the shade and just chatted for an hour, and viewer InAxolotlPain suggested we check out a cool old gate. We kept walking towards the water, then hung a left to the Fukuoka Art Museum.

It was beautiful and a blast, and we finally left chat and decided to hit the museum. We had just enough time to check out the KYNE (pronounced Key-Né) exhibit. The artist has a very pop art style of disaffected women that looks almost digital, but you can see it's all hand painted. There were hand cut mirrors, areas set up to look under construction, and even some sketches we couldn't photograph. Very cool!

We had a reservation at the Kirby Cafe for 2:10pm, so we headed to the Canal City mall area and made it just in time. The restaurant was in the corner of part of the mall, and was a very charming space that was only half full. We'd heard that unlike most character cafes, not only was it very easy to get a reservation, but that the food was also unusually good - and both wound up being true!

We were seated right under the Wispy Woods, and had about 80 minutes in the cafe, which was beautifully decorated and incredibly charming!

Miss_Editor ordered Cracco's Swishing Soda, the finishing blow, which was a drink where you poured strawberry soda over a cotton candy enemy with pop rocks, which made a huge mess!

I drank the Orange Ocean, which was a yummy jelly soda, and both drinks came with a random coaster. We were quite hungry so I ordered a half-and-half pizza of Maxim tomato margherita and Creamy Carbonara with a star-shaped egg (which came with a huge Kirby pizza plate), Miss_Editor got Waddle Dee's omelette rice (also with a commemorative plate), and we split the Kirby Burger & Meat Sauce Pasta. Everything was quite good, but we agreed the pizza was definitely the star! For dessert, we had to get Kirby's birthday cake AND Car-by, which took awhile to come out (we were near the end of our reservation time, but they didn't rush us). They were both yummy and Car-by wasn't too sweet, but the cake unfortunately had huge slices of frozen fruit that I just could not eat! Since it was my birthday month, we requested during the reservation to have "happy birthday" written in chocolate and have a song play, which I got a big kick out of.

Afterwards, they brought out a pizza disk and plate in brand new boxes, and we somehow resisted buying out the gift shop and stuck to a few items.

We were scheduled to meet one of our Twitch viewers, pockydream! We had some extra time, so we visited the Shonen Jump Shop before heading to the big train station/mall. There, we got to meet Pocky, who was an absolute dream! She had some lovely gifts for us from the Philippines, and since she knew I'm trying to get into scrapbooking, gave me some cool washi tape samples, as well as custom Ingress profile cards!

We took photos of Pika Pika and Wobbuffet (who is also frequently photographed at buffets) and then explored the Pokémon Center store!

A very friendly worker helped us in our mission to find Quaxly using our phones' AR, which got us cute Quaxly stickers! I also got a cute card since it's my birthday month.

After quite a bit of shopping, it was raid hour in Pokémon Go! The three of us raided Tapu Fini, and I got a 100% IV while Pocky got a shiny!

We made our way to the rooftop garden for sunset and a few more raids and trades, and then parted ways so we could collapse in the hotel room. (and photograph our hauls, of course.)

We finally roused ourselves to get dinner around 10pm, and kept getting turned away from restaurants until we found a really cool Korean place. We split bibimbap, dumplings, tteokbokki (which Miss_Editor had never tried) and herb French fries, and everything was absolutely delicious.

Then we collapsed in the hotel for real!

Thursday, May 16

My birthday! We had a big day trip out to Mifune today to the Pokémon Fossil Museum, an exhibit that's been travelling around Japan for the past few years.

Getting here was a GAUNTLET, because Mifune is out in the middle of nowhere. We had to take the shinkansen bullet train from Fukuoka to Kumamoto (where Kumamon is from!), then a train, and then a long bus out into rural Japan.

We met many fun characters along the way!

There were a few missed connections along the way, and our attempt to livestream didn't quite work out, but we got to see a cool Monkey D Luffy statue, and after 2.5+ hours, we made it out to this small town!

As we were taking photos of some dinosaur statues and spinning Pokestops, an old grandma approached us, thinking we needed help. She wound up insisting on taking us to the dinosaur museum, and making small talk in broken English and Japanese about how hard each language was!

The museum was absolutely lovely! It was all in Japanese, but they had a web page with Engliah translations to follow along the exhibit, so Miss_Editor read the whole thing out loud so I could take photos. It was actually super interesting and engaging (though the translations were a bit repetitive at times). I never realized how much research and effort went into fossil Pokemon designs, and the exhibit also made really cool connections to real-world archeology, paleontology and biology. I'd forgotten how interesting I find these subjects, and I feel a renewed passion to learn more!

Dex fitting in with fossils

After the exhibit (where Miss_Editor also took photos of me posed with every Pokémon statue), we visited their normal exhibit, which was absolutely gorgeous! I wish we'd had more time to take it all in, but the highlight was definitely the herd of dinosaur skeletons all arranged together like a cool anime intro!

We entered the gift shop and couldn't resist the paleontologist Pikachu plush, plus a ton of other unique merch for ourselves and friends.

Miss_Editor found us a faster bus back to Kumamoto, so we booked it and made the fast bus! We got a few Kumamon souvenirs, then took a break at the hotel (where I snapped merch pics, of course).

For dinner, we headed to the canal for their famous yatai (open air) food stalls.

By 9:30 we finally had a yummy ramen dinner! I enjoyed my black ramen, which is made with blackened garlic - a specialty of the area.

On the walk back, we found a cute little dessert place and grabbed a strawberry shortcake slice and a cream puff, which we ate in a park by a building covered in greenery.

Gotta say, it was a pretty great birthday!

After Fukuoka, we packed our bags for our two-day road trip - but that's for a future blog post!

Thanks for your patience with these, they're super fun (if painstaking) to put together. But it's been such a delight bringing you along for the journey, whether here, in my Instagram stories, or on Twitch! Keep an eye out on all the channels, as we're currently on the last leg of our adventure!