Fukuoka

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Fukuoka

With nowhere booked on the evening, we decided that a big town would be best to find a room for the evening. Everywhere was booked in Kyushu. The only placed we could book was about 16 hours away by train, which we managed to book for the next night. So Fukuoka was out place of choice to break the 16hr journey up.

On the journey up I had visions of us sleeping on a bench or spending the night with the trendy youngsters in McDonalds, in Osaka that would be the norm and perfectly acceptable for the young, however a faux pas amongst the older generation. So much that we could not even get anyone over the age of 40 to even talk about it.
After getting into town, we went straight to the tourist office, within minutes we had a room in a hotel, not actually too expensive either. So very easy, my idea of an adventure was squashed by an overly efficient and friendly tourist advisor.

Fukuoka, is as it name suggest a party town for the hip young people but also quite a seedy party town. So once settled in our hotel, we went to the local Lawson’s to get beer and nibbles and we started to drink in our plain, no charter shambles of a hotel room. We scanned the lonely planet bible to see where the cool places were for our one night on the town, we decided on the small faces and the Dark room, both sounded good and slightly indie so all good. We headed to Small Faces, which was a small funky bar with re-runs of Tom & Jerry cartoons, in which I and James were engrossed in. We were then told to leave our table as we were ordering any food, so we were forced to sit at the bar but we were then charged for sitting at the bar. (This is the norm in Japan; you have to watch the random charges. After being charged a small fortune for beers and childhood nostalgia, we tried to find the Dark Room, we couldn’t find it. So we sat on the main high street with an A4 map trying to figure out where this dam club was. We watched the world go by us as we decided on what to do, which in Fukuoka meant watching pimp out vehicles, loads of foreign drunken messes and receiving numerous paper invitations for porn, strip clubs and black paper tissues.
Getting pretty fed of deciding actually what to do, going back to the hotel was becoming quite appealing. The last train would be leaving soon and as we were getting sober and the world around us was getting drunker, going back was the winning cheaper option. We were so happy that we managed to catch the train, especially after running like idiots across the town. We were ecstatic when we managed to catch our changeover…until we realised that the train was going the opposite direction. So after missing the last trains and we are now in a random part of time, the A4 map came out again and we started our 2hr journey back home sober as a judge. Lucky for us we were in Japan so getting lost in a random part of town, in the dark was relatively safe, even if some of the places were slightly sleazy. So we got home about 2 in the morning sober.

So that is Fukuoka. I think I am quite happy to leave Fukuoka to the hip, cool young people.

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Photos

sexy
The type of clubs we had to choice from!