shinkansen + fukuoka

2/5/2011

8:20aaaaaaaa

Today.

Today i'm meeting up with chris (he's taking a bus from his house up to fukuoka). Later today we will take a plane to sapporo where we will stay for a week, until next saturday. He doesn't get in town until noonish, so i'm going to walk around on the west side of the hakata station, towards the canalcity (one word) mall. 

I went there last night after i got my hotel room so that i would know where i was going today. Less getting lost this time haha. I ate at a yakisoba restaurant there, somewhere on the upper floors... 4th actually. 

Each floor has a specialty or different category. Basement has 100 shops 'dealing with accessories, cosmetics and miscellaneous goods', First floor has 60 more stores, Second and Third floors have a mix of those categories and then more fashion stuff, Fourth floor - restaurants with a rotating sushi bar and then on this floor and the next is a two storey video game/amusement arcade. There's a really big game where a bunch of people sit around and bet on video game horses hahaha. Don't worry, I got a photo. 

Anyway the mall doesn't open till ten, so i'm going to write and drink coffee until 9:30 then head out. My check out is 10:00 anyhow. Before this i got coffee down the street and went to see about a train station locker. They only last up to 24hours, which i was planning on buying stuff and storing it there until we get back from sapporo, but we'll be there a week so that won't work. 

The next three photos are from the ride on the shikansen nozomi SUPER EXPRESS!!!!!  This is the fast one. So fast! Maybe the fastest! up to 300km per hour. That's km, not miles! So it was kind of hard getting decent photos a lot of times - lots of stuff popping up in the way unexpectedly and not much heads up on what i might see. Also an annoying bit of grit somewhere in my lens or camera somewhere… i can't find it!! But you can definitely see it. I'll have to ps it out my good photos later.  I messed with the saturations and whatnot here, but not the compositions. 

The nozomi SUPER EXPRESS!!!!! has the fewest stops and took 5.5 hours to go from tokyo to fukuoka. Even though it goes fast, there's a lot of difficult terrain. The train cuts through mountains with tunnels, so this allows it to not slow down going up and over. Also, my flight here - i thought it was going to go up and over the earth? - it didn't. No, we went over canada and alaska and stuff, so just north-westish in a semi-circle really. 

Ok. Time to check out and go malling.

Canalcity Mall