Other “Kindy” Adventures

Kim and I returned to Kurume late on Thursday night, leaving her with three more days to go in her Japan adventure. We started out kind of slowly on Friday, taking the train to Dazaifu in the afternoon. We enjoyed soft cream (sakura for me, wasabi for brave Kim) and manju along the road with all the shops; Kim bought some more presents to take home and I purchased a spring scarf. Friday night, we had a special appointment with my calligraphy teacher, Naoko-sensei to come over for a lesson and dinner with her and her husband. Kim got to try her hand at shuji, and I got some good pointers on improving my technique for the monthly test. Dinner was as always, delicious. We had cabbage rolls and the usual assortment of yummy sides all washed down with root beer floats left over from last week’s pot luck. A very enjoyable evening, and a good chance to experience something different from what most people do during their trips to Japan. Friday night was also our chance to catch up on season 4 of LOST, watching six episodes back to back, just the way I like them, into the wee hours of the morning.

The characters don't look that hard, but...

Saturday was spent enjoying local offerings such as West Coast, Daruma restaurant and strawberry picking. Since we had stayed up so late the night before, Kim and I didn’t have a whole lot of time to comb the racks at West Coast, but it was a still a good way to start the day. After, Jamie and Allison joined us on the bus downtown for a lunch of okonomiyaki at Daruma before boarding the local train out into the strawberry fields for an hour of fruit eating frenzy. I vaguely remember picking strawberries with my family when I was younger, and most of that memory is of baby Andrew, sitting under an umbrella, making a mess. This reminded me not to wear white. I vaguely remember having to crouch or sit in the dirt between the rows of plants and searching for the tasty fruits, and was expecting a similar experience here.

Mmmmmm. Lunch time!! Okonomiyaki (egg pancake with cabbage and pork,) Hiroshima style with noodles inside. Delicious!

After walking a good distance from the station, we arrived at “Berry House,” a strawberry tabehodai operation located in a large, peaked-roof green house. We paid our 1150 yen, received small plastic bags for the stems and watched a brief picking demonstration before heading out on our own into the rows of ingeniously arranged plants. No crouching on the ground here. The plants were grown on “shelves” that had mesh “counters” hanging off of them, which made the strawberries ridiculously easy to find and pluck from the vine. So easy in fact, that after a mad 20 minutes of eating, we all had to take a break and wash the strawberries down with some water. After a good rest, we were ready to head out again, this time each of us armed with our complimentary cup of sweetened condensed milk to dip the strawberries in. The addition of a new flavor made it much easier to eat more. When our hour was up, we wiped the stickyness from our hands and slowly waddled back to the train station (in the most round about manner.) Uff! After the strawberry indulgence, everyone was a bit out of commission for the evening. Kim and I planned out our day in Fukuoka and went to bed.

Welcome to "Be-ri--Ha-u-su!"

Rows and rows of easily accessible ichigo for the picking (and eating!)

Enjoying the fruits of our (very marginal) labor.

Sunday dawned grey and rainy…a perfect day for shopping and art viewing in Fukuoka! We took an early-ish train and arrived just as things were opening. Our first stop of the day was the “Pieces of Peace” exhibit, a traveling exhibit of World Heritage sites built out of Lego. Very cool. Some of them I’d even been to, like Kinkakuji, Itsukajima??? Shrine in Hiroshima, but most of them I have just seen in pictures, or now, as Lego replicas. All of the “pieces” (ha ha) were very well done. There were even Legos you could play with, so Kim and I sat at the wee child sized tables and constructed some things to leave our mark.

Exhibit from above. I really liked the posters for it.

Recognize this? It's Kinkakuji in Kyoto.

I really hope you know what this is.

Next we started shopping with a stop at Spinns, where I bought two used dresses and started a point card. If I spend $500 at Spinns in the next 18 months, I will get a whopping $30 off! At orientation, veteran JETs recommended collecting point cards from everywhere—they were your tickets to saving money. Yeah right! I have yet to have one pay off. After Spinns, we walked across the street to Solaria Plaza, started at the top of the building and worked our way down. We stopped for lunch at a very popular doria café, steaming rice covered with sauce and your choice of toppings was an excellent pick-me up on a rainy day. After lunch we finished our tour of Solaria Plaza, went to the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, searched unsuccessfully for a shichirin, or table top grill for Kim’s mom and ended our day at Loft, department store extraordinaire, where two of its seven floors are dedicated entirely to stationary, photo albums and desk supplies. (Although it was not something we wrote on our roommate housing forms five years ago, a fondness for pens, colored paperclips and the like is just one of many things Kim and I have in common.) I was thinking Loft would take about 40 minutes, allowing us to catch the train back to Kurume and meet Jamie for dinner at the ramen shop down the street from my apartment. Loft took about twice that long, (Kim and I are also unable to make decisions, another common trait) and we didn’t eat dinner until almost 9. But on the bright side, we worked up quite the appetite, and for the first time ever, I didn’t feel overly full upon leaving Tatsunoya.

Monday morning, I took Kim to the train station and put her on the bus for the airport. After seeing her off, I went home, changed and headed into the office for the rest of the day, thus concluding the first week of spring break and my vacation time. The second week was much less remarkable, or at least seems that way since most of it was spent in a food coma. When we are in the office, we eat lunch out everyday, and there were various functions that prevented me from eating dinner at home in my apartment until the next Saturday!