The City

Yesterday we went to Fukuoka to shop. I'm having trouble finding the correct plug adapter type, I brought one from home and when that turned out to be the wrong kind, I bought two at one local store and those were wrong too. Then I may have bought one more. That was also wrong. Sometimes, I can be spectacularly stupid.

Some of it was my fault; the one I brought from Finland was actually from Japan to Finland -type of adapter and I maybe should have seen it from the adapter. And from those other millions of adapters I'm now swimming in. It's actually super hard, if not impossible, to find the suitable adapter here. I need type F, or type C grounded, and good luck finding that. The man at Yodobashi, a huge electronic store, looked at me with big surprise when I tried to tell him type F. He didn't even know it existed. Currently I'm working with two different types of adapters attached to one another. I'm a technical wunderkind. Reminds me of the time I couldn't activate a smoke bomb for a shoot and then poked it with a stick dipped in lighter fluid and lit on fire. Worked like a charm, though.

Anyways, we headed to Fukuoka with two of my residence mates and after the peace of the countryside Itoshima, it was a bit of a shock. We got the subway to the Hakata station and I think then we wandered into a business district that sort of reminded me of certain parts of London. We got lost in a few, huge all-you-can-shop shops, like Yodobashi, and Don Quixote. Don Quixote is particularly insane. If you've been at the Oxford Circus Primark on a busy day, you still won't have any idea of what Don Quixote is like. Next to it, Primark feels like an oasis of peace. Like an abandoned island.

At first the bustle was interesting but then it quickly got very exhausting. I also felt pretty insecure because I stick out like a big, white sore thumb everywhere and it makes me feel like a huge, white, western Godzilla stomping about. Looking at petite Japanese women with their crisp pastel dresses and towering high heels, I feel like the white whale.

The night came and it was a little easier, I've always been a creature of the dark (in every way). We ended up at the Canal area, I think it's called Nakasu. The lights were so beautiful in the dark, all the little shops overlooking the canal, the random shrine, the the lanterns, it felt like a completely different city. I even saw a few possibly abandoned old factories and those are always a favorite.

I also totally found Yuuko's shop! If you don't read manga or haven't read xxxHoLiC, this makes no sense to you. Long story short, Yuuko is a kind of a dimensional witch who has a shop in a big city. Well, I say shop, but it's kind of a dimensional hot spot and her work is to grant wishes. The shop is a small house between big buildings and you can only see it if you need to. Otherwise you only see an empty lot. It looks like this: