After checking out and locking up our luggage at Hakata station, we wanted to determine the boarding location of our overnight bus to Osaka was so that we wouldn’t miss it. The friendly but hopeless information desk at Hakata station once again was unable to provide us with anything resembling coherent information. We managed to find the location thanks to a random Lawson’s shopper, so it was all good.

I can’t help compare the English level between China and Japan. What in the name of Johnson McDicksworth is going on here? Japan is already a highly developed country, so there is no reason for the average Hiroshi to pick up English from an economic point of view…or is there? In China, it seems like everyone is learning English or is gonna die trying. Hell, in Shanghai, it’s hard to find people who can’t speak English. Even my 80-year-old Shanghainese neighbors can string together abstract sentences about pickled radish. You wanna know why Shanghai is the most developed city in China? It’s because foreign businessmen can come here and communicate with hookers without their minders. If that’s not an economic advantage I don’t know what is. It seems however that not everyone in Japan is ignoring this though.

On the topic of language, I’m surprised more people here don’t speak Chinese. I was expecting more people in the service industry to have the mad Mandarin skills, since Chinese tourists are flocking here like birds trying to escape from their cages that haven’t been cleaned in 30 years and are all stank with bird shit. Ixnay on the Chinesay though.

Most of our day was spent checking out the absolutely deserted shrines and temples of Fukuoka. Most of them had been totally rebuilt, and while they were well maintained, most of them looked like they had been rebuilt rather recently and in such a way that it ruined their original aesthetic in terms of choice of materials. This is something I’ve grown accustomed to seeing in China, as many temples there have been totally rebuilt. Compared to what I saw in Fukuoka, China also has the advantage here. My assumed logic behind this is that most of the Shrines and Temples in Japan are still used for very specific purposes, and hence the Japanese have gone with functional renovations in many of the temples, cramming them with the little engineering feats that make life so convenient here, like robotic incense dispensers and such.

Before long it was time to bid Fukuoka adieu for the time being as we were off via the overnight bus to Osaka.

Filed under: tourist shit