Fukuoka, Sasebo, and beyond

The graduation ceremony takes place on a Saturday, which makes that a regular work day, so in exchange, teachers got the previous Monday off. That gave us all a three-day weekend, and I wasn't about to spend it freezing my butt off on Tsushima. I quickly planned a trip to Fukuoka with Joey, the other high school ALT on the island. We flew out together on a Friday night, met a friend in town, and had Mexican food. While he found a hostel, I decided to pamper myself with a night in a hotel. (Imagine how luxurious central heating and a bed--any bed--are when you're used to sleeping on the floor in a 50-degree room.) Saturday we just milled around, doing our own thing. I spent about four hours reading War and Peace in the subway station's McDonald's, of all places. Taken out of context, I know that sounds pathetic, but I've missed being able to curl up someplace warm with a book and just read. Silent places put me to sleep, so the din of a subway station restaurant was perfect.

As I wandered around Fukuoka, I found mayonnaise-flavored Doritos (which I couldn't stomach buying), an amazing looking guitar, and a few nice examples of Engrish. Two of them are here and here, but the last one warrants a bit of explanation. Joey pointed it out to me. Japan has its own professional basketball league. I don't mean to suggest Japan should copy America--I don't need to; they do it most of the time anyway. In this case, then, one would expect such a league to be called something like the Japanese Professional Basketball Association, the Japan Basketball League, or just the Japan Basketball Association. Instead, they went with this. I also found a water show put to the Pirates of the Caribbean theme.

That night, we met up with three of the nearby Fukuoka JETs that Joey had met at orientation. As usual, it was fun to hang out with other anglophones, especially the single girl variety. We ate at a Thai place for dinner, which was great fun (Joey and I had to tell the bartender how to make a Black Russian for me), and spent a while just talking about the adventures each of us has been on so far. Some of Joey's Japanese friends met up with us, too.

It had been raining off-and-on all day, but by the time we left the restaurant, it was sleeting. As the rest of the group went on to a club, I decided to call it a night, and on the taxi ride back, it was officially snowing. It's not all that common around here (think of northeast Georgia--snow happens, just not very often), and it was my first experience with snow in Japan, so I liked it.

The next morning it was snowing steadily. None of it was sticking, though. I'm such a geek that I deemed the event videoworthy, but when I try to upload it, the quality gets so grainy that you can't even tell it's snowing. Joey had been planning to go snowboarding nearby with some of his Japanese friends, and I was gonna tag along. His friends forgot to bring their gear, though, so the trip got called off. On a whim, then, I decided to hop a bus to Sasebo, where a few friends of mine live. I took the subway back to the airport (five minutes from my hotel) and hopped on a highway bus for the $20, hour-long ride.

Sasebo is a decently big port town with a naval base nearby. Being there is the closest to America I've felt the whole time I've been in Japan: the first thing I saw when I stepped out of the bus station was a Baskin Robbins and a Seattle's Best Coffee. There were English bookstores, KFCs, and Mountain Dew everywhere. Anyway. The reason I went to Sasebo was to meet up with Mutia, Zoe, and Rachel, three girls I met at the Nagasaki Orientation back in September. We've been scheming for the past month or two on taking a trip somewhere at the end of April. We've decided on Indonesia.

Mutia's parents are Indonesian, so she's fluent in the language, and knows the country very well. That takes care of my trepidation about the language barrier, which put such a damper on my Taiwan trip. The group isn't too big (four of us), and... it's freaking Indonesia, folks. I didn't exactly need to be talked into going.

So I wanted to meet up with them to talk about the plan, and go see the travel agent they found. The whole trip will take eight days, with an overnight stopover each way in Taipei (maybe it won't rain this time! woohoo!). We'll be flying from Taipei to Denpasar, Bali, where we'll stay a couple of days at the Hyatt (thanks to one of them having some accumulated frequent flyer miles). From there we'll go to Yogyakarta and Borobudur, before heading to Jakarta. Someone in Mutia's family is apparently getting married, and we've been invited to the reception, so we'll get to see the part of a traditional Indonesian wedding.

My favorite part of the trip, however, is a little side quest we've plotted. Mutia isn't in on this, leaving just Zoe, Rachel, and me. We're trying our best to go to Kalimantan (that's the Indonesian part of Borneo) for a three-day, two-night... orangutan tour. That's right. We'll take a boat down a river through an orangutan rehabilitation center, watch a feeding, and soak up the humidity and the rain forest (and a few thousand mosquito bites, I'm sure). I can't even begin to describe how excited I am about this, but it's not finalized yet, so no more talk about it until it is.

We all met up to talk about the trip, and we all agree it's going to be the coolest trip ever. After adjourning the meeting, three of us decided to celebrate over tex-mex food. I had an enormous chimichanga and some nachos. It was simply amazing. Afterwards, the girls showed me around a little more, taking me through what's apparently the longest open-air mall in Japan, though I might have heard wrong.

They had to leave early (they aren't high school teachers, so they had to go to work the next day), but I was perfectly content entertaining myself. I found a local theater, checked the showtimes, and had just enough time to check in at a hotel and drop off my stuff. I wanted to see the kids movie about the Loch Ness monster, but it only played in the morning, so I contented myself with Sweeney Todd. I was the only one in the theater, which made the whole experience remind me of sneaking into a matinee back home, complete with smuggling in a Snickers bar and Mountain Dew. I loved it.

I caught the bus back to Fukuoka the next morning, and met back up with Joey to catch our flight back to Tsushima. All of this in a normal three-day weekend, no vacation time taken. Thanks to this, I'm determined to use other three day weekends (like in September, when we get three of them in a row) to make quick excursions to places like Hiroshima, Kumamoto, and Beppu.