Ladies and gentlemen, let me FINALLY welcome you to this first episode of my “Japanese Adventures”. I know, I know. It sounds a little pretentious, and it’s more of a relaxing vacation than a full-fledged adventure, but whatever.

So, what have I been up to ?

Day 0 [27-28/04] : Wanderlust

Before one can enjoy life in a far-off country, one first needs to get there. And oh boy, was this travel long… Just to break it down :

5 hours spent waiting in Zaventem Airport;
1 hour to fly to Munich
2 hours waiting in Munich before…
11 hours and a half to get to Narita Airport.

But Narita is still far away from Fukuoka, so you need to add to that more than 6 hours of train… So you can imagine how happy I was to FINALLY meet Pascale… Who didn’t want her photo taken, apparently.

This one looks like a commercial picture

After that long-awaited reunion, we went to the the creepy building I would be staying in for a little more than 2 weeks. And it was really creepy, with the wind making strange noise with the windows, the eerie silence and the slightly run-down appearance of it all…

Okay, now you tell me. WHERE are the zombies ?

But, you need to know that I could have agreed on sleeping anywhere at that point, because I was hungry as hell. Because, you see, I was asleep when they brought the meal in the plane. Then, with all the trains and so forth, I didn’t have the chance to grab anything to eat. So I put down my stuff, and we rushed to the nearest “Joyfull”. Now laugh all you want, but the double “l” is not a misspelling on their part… It’s some kind of 24h/24 semi-fast food that serves all kinds of hamburgers (not in buns like “typical” fast-foods, though), pizzas, and also some japanese dishes. And that double-hamburger with cheese was more than enough to fill me up. Not sure if I was full with joy, though…

Day 1 [29/04] : Past times with good company

The next day was the day my sister took me to what was supposed to be a ginormous electronics store with everything I could ever want in it. I won’t comment on that, but let me say that she was “also surprised, [she] thought there was more in it”. But anyway, that was cool because then we got to eat some Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. And even if that contained a lot of cabbage, it was still delicious. A little difficult to eat, but it tasted awesome.

This is where the delicious food gets eaten.

The evening of the 29th was something I couldn’t wait for : I was to meet the group of students that came to Louvain-la-Neuve at the end of winter. This year again, seeing them go had been a sad moment, so being able to reunite with at least some of them was something I was really looking forward to.

And what a night it was ! First, we went eating in a restaurant where we had a reserved room, and where we could order as much drinks and food as we wanted to. I’m sorry, I can’t remember what we ate exactly though, there was just too much different plates… Anyway, we moved around quite a bit, changin places so that everyone was able to talk with pretty much everyone, which was really fun.

Afterwards, we went – of course – to an arcade to take some crazy “Purikura” pictures, then off to the karaoke we went ! And seein as we (as in, Pascale and I, because she was falling asleep) left at 3:30 in the morning, you can guess how much fun we had !

And I sang 2 Backstreet Boys songs… Not alone, but still. At least I compensated with Stratovarius and Enter Shikari !

All in all, that was an awesome way to kick off this trip, I was so glad to be able to catch a first glimpse of Pascale’s universe in Fukuoka, and of course to see everyone again ! Now, this will do as a first batch of “news”, because the internet connection is acting up here, so I’ll wait until later tonight when I can upload pictures more easily… Stay tuned for more news almost-live from Fukuoka !

…from this building, in particular.