Fukuoka once again

GUESS WHO
I guess if you don't know
you can wait a paragraph or two

On Christmas Eve, I set out with a couple of friends to Fukuoka once again. This time instead of a day trip, we went to stay for two nights. My friends were going to Fukuoka Airport to fly out to Thailand for their winter vacation, and I was accompanying them for fun, and so that I could go see a concert going on in the city. When we first got in, we got all settled in the hotel, which was placed right near the HIP and HAPPENING area of town, and was super convenient for pretty much everything we wanted to do.

After that, we set out to explore the city a bit, and came upon a huge toy/comic store that had all sorts of stuff for sale. I found a whole bunch of bearbricks and kubrick figures, and picked up a tron lightcycle in wireframe. It's fantastic; the stand that it comes with is supposed to be the trail that the lightcycles leave, and there's a little wireframe dude to go along with it.

Some fool on ebay is trying to sell this for 50 bucks

The rest of the day we pretty much just walked around looking at stuff, ate, and then went to karaoke. The next day I walked around with Ryan, a dude from Vancouver, and we just started wandering around, looking into stores and exploring. Eventually we ended up in an indoor snowboarding hill and we were all "Whaaaaaa? Where did this come from?" It probably wouldn't have been so surprising (I mean, they have these things elsewhere), but most everyone we had talked to had no idea about things like this, or even just an average skate park (Ryan is a big BMX dude. I uh, I didn't really care all too much).

We also found a ton of different stores just by walking around. Ryan happened to share a big interest in sneakers with me, so we wanted to hit up all the same places and things worked out well. Unfortunately, neither of us are really able to find sneakers in our size, because we both have pretty big feet (sizes 13 and 14), but that doesn't stop us from looking around.

For dinner we found a Jamaican restaurant near the hotel. Some of you may be thinking "Why is he eating Jamaican food while he's in Japan? How silly," but after having Japanese food every day for a while it stops being "WOOOO JAPANESE FOOD EVERYDAY" and becomes "food." It was my first time having for real Jamaican food, and it was pretty dang delicious. We talked to the owner of the restaurant, who cooked our meal. Turns out he was born in Jamaica, but moved over to New York later on.

After all that, Ryan and I went to go see Carl Cox at some club near the hotel. It was a bit odd though, because the venue limited the audience to 300 people, and even then there couldn't have been 300 in the club. The Japanese don't seem to do concerts and live shows like we do back in the States, or anywhere else for that matter. It seems that instead of going to see a huge name play at a local club, they would rather go and sing at a television set. Go fig. Also, even those who do go out to the club just kind of end up being sweaty, dancing out of time and making a lot of noise. However, as much of a bummer as that sounds, the awesomeness of Carl Cox totally made up for it (his dancing was supreme).

The next day I saw my friends off and went off on my own to walk around and look for stuff. I didn't find all too much, but I did manage to snag a fantastic photo in one of the bookstores.