Hey folks,
It’s about 5:50am and I am wide awake *sigh*. Guess I haven’t quite gotten used to the time change yet. Anyway, yesterday was quite the experience of us. After spending the night sleeping on the most God aweful pillows ever provided by the University, I decided I wanted a new one and Will agreed. To elaborate, these pillows are about one third the size of a standard pillow back home and they are stuffed with small cylindrical plastic pieces. You can’t even find pillows like these back in the states. In addition to a new pillow, we needed to go back to the supermarket and pick up odds and ends items.

We left Seinan at about 1pm with 2 dictionaries, a phrase book, and a map of the city hoping it would be enough to get us by. We started off by going back to the supermarket, named “Sunny” that we had previously visited. Before we had reached the supermarket, we stopped at a vending machine on the corner near Seinan for a drink. To elaborate, there are vending machines with drinks practically on everyother corner here. I then proceeded to put in 100 yen for a soda and frankly startling both of us, the machine started to talk back! At the moment we have no idea what it said. We were more stunned than anything. Think of it as, if a dog started talking to you. You’re more focused on the act than the content. That there was a bit of culture shock. On the way to the supermarket we walked right into a store that sold pillows. How convenient! After going to the supermarket, we sat down for a few minutes on a bench that happened to be infront of a Baskin Robbins. Yay ice cream! Afterwards, we went back to the store that sold pillows, named “Romance”. Thankfully these new pillows are more like ours back in the states. After completing our tasks for the day, we walked back to Seinan and relaxed for about 40 minutes. I was far too excited and hungry to stay any longer.. so the next task we had, get lunch.

Now normally getting lunch isn’t much of an adventure, but being here things are totally different. We decided that we wanted to go to a small noodle shop and that McDonald’s was a last resort. Yes, there is a McDonald’s and KFC a short distance from campus, but we haven’t visited either yet. Roaming up and down streets, it look us awhile before we found a little restaurant that looked appealing and very reasonably priced. We stood outside this restaurant for a good 10 minutes trying to decifer the kanji on the sign to figure out what sounded yummy. “Gyuseshi”.. a bowl of rice with thin strips of beef and a beef sauce was our decided lunches. Confident we knew how to order, we walked in and sat down at the counter. After a few minutes of waiting, we were served water along with a man across from us. He then handed her a ticket and I had assumed it was a coupon. The woman then came over to us and looked slightly confused. She then pointed to a vending looking machine that was next to the door as you walk in. It took us a moment, but we put two and two together when we walked over to the vending machine. You pay for your food using the machine, it gives you appropriate change and a ticket, which you give to the waitress. Amazing! A large bowl of Gyusenshi cost 480 yen (about 4.60$ USD). After handing the woman our tickets, we waited for no more than 10 minutes and the food arrived. It was served with a small bowl of miso soup. The only utensils we had were chopsticks. How do you eat soup with chopsticks? Answer: you don’t. It is customary to drink the soup directly from the bowl. If someone did that back in the states it would be considered taboo, but here it’s the norm. After finishing our lunches, we slowly made it back to Seinan and rested for about an hour before we went out again. The goal of this outting: take pictures and find our way to Fukuoka Tower (the tallest building in the city) and Momochi Seaside (the beach). Conveniently, those two locations were near eachother. So with our map in hand, we headed toward the tower. Walking toward the tower we noted the architecture looked more modern and Will was reminded of Baltimore, as opposed to eariler when we were further in the city and it looked more traditional. We spent a good amount of time looking around Momochi seaside and Fukuoka Tower. Being so close to the water, it was much cooler and less humid then further in the city. It was a much needed relief. While at Momochi Seaside, we stopped at another vending machine (this one didn’t talk) and got a non-carbonated orange drink (like Sunny-D), named “Qoo”. Off in the distance across the bay we spotted the large ferris wheels and what I believe is another boardwalk.

Overall, the day was very successful and we are building more confidence that we won’t starve or get lost haha. Today, we plan to either take a subway into Tenjin (a different district of Fukuoka that appears to the be largest district and lots of shopping) or make our way over to the ferris wheels and explore that portion of town.

Talk to you all soon!
Love,
Haley