Fukuoka

The awakening!

What has awakened? I have no idea. It just seemed like a good subtitle. Or, really, maybe I have. I am now not worried in the SLIGHTEST about rolling into a town completely unannounced and being able to acquire reasonable housing within 30 minutes of exiting the train station. Heh, good thing this is the last time I'll have to do that on this trip. Hoo-ray for a skill I won't need until it is rusty with disuse!

After securing a Ryokan where I will rest my tired body this evening, I headed over to Canal City which is a gigantic COMPLEX of buildings that create one giant super mall. It is a work of, well, commercialism I guess. But in the center building on the fifth floor is the Ramen Fight Ring. As mentioned before, this is where makers of ramen go to determine their worth. You are either exalted on high and given a proper shop on a busy street selling to the salary men, or you are cast down to make burgers and fries at McDonald's all the while moaning in pain and agony each time grease kicks up from the deep fryer and you think to yourself, 'these hands of mine had the power for such good, and they are but charred rememnants of crappy fries and flavorless meat pods. WHY GODS! Why have you cursed me so!'

Needless to say, I approached with due trepidation that my choice would be deciding the fates of men and women for DECADES to come!

Okay, I might be exaggerating a bit there, but there actually are 8 restaurants which specialize in noodles from different parts of Japan and the East Coast of the mainland, ie, China and Korea. I hit up a Chinese Ramen noodle stand I think. I am not totally sure because the signs, you see, they are written in Japanese. And I still don't speak Japanese. It was very tasty and after I eat lunch tomorrow I will cast a vote at random. Hee... I am a capricious god!

Afterwards I ambled over to the folk museum where I saw a bunch of stuff about the history of the Fukuoka/Hakata area. Crazy stuff. They used to make POTS! Next door was an old house that had been rebuilt and had an old tradional loom being operated by, at first glance, what appeared to be someone from 300 years ago. Turns out, he was only 80-ish! He was trying to make something, but the loom was being very, very bitchy.

After that was another temple (le shock!) and now I am hanging about online dorking around with photographs, blogs, emails and other things which are done on the interweb. Tomorrow will be another big park, some asian art and then, I dunno, maybe a game of murder-death-kill with the dude next to me who thinks I should be able to clearly hear his video game.

EDIT
Updated photos and added a new video from Harajuku. It was too big before to upload. Oh, and the photo link should be straigtened out now.