Beach picnic and our last day in the kaikan

Ena and I went for a picnic on the beach near our place the other day to watch the sunset. It was kind of nice, we had the beach all to ourselves.


Tomorrow we are moving into our new place. We are pretty excited but at the same time I'm going to miss the kaikan. Its been a good home to us for an exciting year and we have a ton of good memories of the place, many of them chronicled on this blog.

Today we were busy packing. I thought the place looked really chaotic from all the packing but then I realized it pretty much always looks like this. One of the two photos below I took today in the middle of packing, the other one I took a few weeks ago of just what the apartment normally looks like. They look pretty much the same.

The air bed, a bargain and my famicom collection

Ena and I went shopping at the second hand shop yesterday and picked up a new fridge, washing machine and some other odds and ends for the apartment.

One deal I found at the second hand shop was this shochu dispenser, complete with cups for only 500 yen:

In other news my famicom cartridge collection is now over 200. They look kind of neat:

We tried sleeping on the inflatable bed one night this week. It was fun but getting the thing deflated again was a pain:

Anniversary

It was our sixth anniversary on the weekend so Ena and I spent the day together. We cycled to Momochihama and spent a bit of time relaxing on the beach:


After that we went to Marinoa, which is a huge outlet mall in Western Fukuoka. For reasons that I completely fail to understand they felt compelled to build two ferris wheels at the place. One I can understand, but two? More importantly, why would anybody ever choose to go on the smaller one when you've got one twice as big right next to it?

Anyway, we did a lot of shopping and had a good time so that was a lot of fun. After all the shopping we had a nice dinner at a nearby restaurant:

Done!

I finished my thesis today! In triplicate, printed and bound.

79 pages about corporate governance. I won't bore anyone with the details, suffice it to say it won't be the next Harry Potter.

Its a major relief though, that is a lot of writing. Next step: 300 page LLD thesis.

Fireworks in Fukuoka

Ena and I went to the Fireworks festival in Ohori Park today. It was quite impressive, the show lasted an hour and a half and was far and away the best display of fireworks I've ever seen. Ohori park is near the site of Fukuoka castle, this is Ena in front of the moat:

We had Takoyaki from a vendor for dinner:

We ran into some friends who had bought yukata for the occasion there:

On the way back we rode our bikes through Nakasu, which is Fukuoka's entertainment district


There was this bizarre stall with a cat selling ice cream on the sidewalk that I had to take a few pictures of:



Also this sidewalk stall where people try to fish eel out of a bucket (the prize for winning: an eel) was kind of interesting:



Question: It is 11:30 on a Saturday night, where is your 5 year old son?

Answer: He is in Fukuoka's red light district with a bunch of hostesses trying to fish eels out of a big bucket. Where else would he be?

Damage from the storm

I took my camera around to snap a couple of pictures of some damage from the storm. Really there wasn't much in our area.

A large section of this concrete retaining wall was washed away:


And a number of fishing boats tied up along the riverside were sunk, but it probably won't be too hard to salvage them at low tide:




Not too sure if this was storm related but this car took out a no entry sign before plowing into this metal fence:

Torrential rain hits town

Yesterday we had a massive rain storm that at one point dropped an astonishing 114 mm of rain in a single hour on Fukuoka.

I took this video of the rain from our balcony at the height of the storm, though it doesn't really do it justice!

There has been a lot of damage in the city and suburbs from floods and landslides. All of downtown Fukuoka was knee deep in water yesterday evening and thousands of people along riversides had to be evacuated. A number of people were killed either from landslides destroying their homes (including 6 residents of an elderly care home in Yamaguchi) or from being washed away by flood waters (including a 7 year old boy not far from where we live).

Looks like the rain has passed and the floodwaters have receded. And this isn't even the typhoon season!