Goodbye Fukuoka

My time in Fukuoka is over now. I’ve spent the past 6.5 weeks here and have really liked the city. Also you quickly start to develop your habits in a new place and meet new people, so it’s a bit hard to leave now.
This last weekend I did plenty of “social” stuff, hanging out with people that I like and having fun. Friday afternoon I finally went to Robosquare, the roboter center in Momochi. It’s really fun, they do dance shows and stuff with the robots and you can talk with the “Hallo Kitty” robot. Friday evening we went to dinner at one of my Fukuoka favorites, “Alohana”, the Japanese-Hawaiian restaurant in Daimyo. After, we went to the famous “Happy Cock” to enjoy the “all-you-can-drink” offer once more. “Happy Cock” is really quite commercial and there are way too many American marines hanging out there as well. But when you’re a larger group it’s a compromise that will not totally piss off anybody. We met some “old friends” like “The hair” or the sleazy host club boys and it was not that bad at all.
Saturday I paid Momochi another visit and did actually study quite a bit as well (“kanji for beginners”). Nice as always… Saturday evening we met at “Morris”, then relocated to “Tatoo Bar” and then Atilla proposed to go to “Keith Flack” a small Dn’B Club in Tenjin. Should have discovered that one earlier, it’s really a pretty cool place and so are the people there. Left at 6 only… There was an embarassing episode though! We wanted to get a drink and two guys were blocking the bar. I said to David: "they could move their ass a bit, they already have their drink". Well, they turned around bowed and said "sorry" and I in turn bowed and said sorry and felt stupid. You should not assume that people don't understand English, even if they don't when it would be useful.
Sunday I had to do some cleaning up, separating the stuff I needed to send home by mail, etc. Later we went for dinner to “La Bohème” and had some pretty good Italian food.
My real goodbye was on Tuesday night when I came back from Korea. Luckily I DID make it past the immigration officer. See the related blog post… I really felt quite happy to be back in Japan! Anyway, we again went to “Alohana” (yes, we are boring!) and had another shared dinner – we would order several dishes and eat from all of them because it’s too difficult to choose just one. We made Atilla and David strike some “gay poses” for the camera, giving each other flowers and so on. One of the Japanese guys at the table next to ours felt asked to tell the story about his “gay phase” when he was a “lonely boy” then and came sitting at our table. It was quite funny, although we were not sure whether he actually wanted to say everything he said or whether it was due to poor English skills that he ended up saying them. His furious girlfriend then commanded him to go back to his table… We all missed the last subway, so we ended up going to an Izakaya (Japanese style pub) till 3.
Fukuoka, I’l miss you! But I will come back for the Sunset Live Openair in early September, that should be fun.