April 5 - Fukuoka

Today we had a run of good luck and happy coincidences that turned it into quite a lot of fun, but this’ll be a long post capturing it all.

We started the day learning how to use the local bus in Fukuoka and took it to view some Buddhist temples: Shōfuku-ji, Jōten-ji, and Tōchō-ji. While the weather is cool, it is all quite picturesque because this far south the cherry blossoms have already started to fall and are in such vast amounts that it looks like snow on the ground.

Of the Buddhist temples the best was Tōchō-ji, with its 50’ tall wooden Buddha (no pictures allowed) that had a strange tunnel underneath: for the first ten meters there were detailed paintings depicting demons and devils and a hellish landscape, and then you had to work your way through a curved and winding hallway in complete and utter darkness, just feeling your way forward along the walls. Surely it represented having faith and moving forward into the unknown and/or emerging into the light, but there was nothing in English anywhere so we’ll never know.

Next we switched to Shinto shrines with a visit to Kushida-jinja where we had a stroke of good luck. A woman approached me and asked if we wanted free tickets to a tea ceremony, as she had already bought them but then three members of her family had failed to show up. Almost anywhere else in the world this would have set of my Spidey Senses as an obvious scam, but with the Japanese we decided to go with it and it turned out quite well. Within minutes we had a guide getting us ready for a traditional Japanese tea ceremony.

Out of respect we didn't take pictures during the actual ceremony, which was a shame because the pastries they served were the most visually stunning things we've ever been served. They were crafted as lifelike pink tulips and were the very definition of “wanting to have your cake and eat it too”.

Afterwards we exited the shrine and stumbled upon the latest craze in Japan: an Owl Café. These are notoriously hard to get in to but our lucky streak held up and they had open spots within the hour, just enough time for us to grab some Japanese curry for lunch in the meantime.

The Owl Café was a strange experience: the owls are free but the coffee and/or soft drinks are 15,000 yen each. (There’s only one other business I’m aware of where you spend almost $20 for a Coke… ;) ) After ordering our drinks we immediately abandoned them and spent the next hour taking photos with owls of various shapes and sizes. What a hoot! (HAR HAR HAR HAR!!! I'm hilarious.)

After the Owl Café our lucky streak ran out and disaster struck!

In an attempt to pack light for this holiday, I only brought a single pair of long pants (hoping the weather would be warmer than it has turned out to be so far). Over the last couple days the crotch has been slowly ripping, resisting all emergency sewing-kit attempts at repair. At some point during the visit with the owls it finally gave out exposing the world to more than what is honorable - no wonder the owl’s eyes were so wide! Amazingly, we managed to find Japanese jeans in sizes that fit me inside of fifteen minutes in the nearby Canal City mall complex. However, it was quite a performance trying to explain to the non-English-speaking, female sales clerk that I was not taking the pants off to purchase them (so she would have to scan the bar code on my arse) as well as miming that we wanted her to throw my current pants away. (Point at pants… mimic throwing away from you with both hands, then running in the opposite direction.)

Afterwards we found that the nearby Yanagabashi Market was closed, and with such a busy morning it had gotten so late we would have to put off the remaining sites we wanted to visit until the next day.

Today’s lesson: Any day is a good day when you return to the hotel in a different pair of pants than you set out in.