Monday night was spent in a Japanese Sauna, with the usual snorting and farting from old Japanese men. At least it was a relatively cheap night.
Tuesday started off pretty slow until I made my way to Canal City - a shopping mall based on the theme of a man made canal.
The magical thing about Canal City was that it contained a map in English of the Hakata region. It would have been extremely if they had one of these at the tourist information centre. Now that I had a map, I could start exploring this city properly.
The majority of the city contained shrines and temples.
Eventually I stumbled across a guitar shop. This contained a crazy old Japanese man who seemed to be a guitar teacher. He becconed me into his shop and spoke to his students. Pretty soon he was pulling out some fast, noisy riffs - impressive for an old person!
The shop owner directed me to a bar by the name of House of Guitar which I had read about earlier in the day on the internet. This bar apparently is full of guitars, has guitars as tables, has a fret board as a bar top. Basically it's a bar for guitar heads - just my cup of tea.
The bar opened at 8pm - so I went back to my cumfy capsule hotel and prepared for a big last night in Japan.
I arrived at the bar pretty much right on 8pm. Unfortunately for the bar tender, I was the only person there. He could speak English but had a fairly limited vocabulary. Pretty soon we both sat down and jammed - ah music, the international language! After some time some people joined us who could speak English and eventually the owner arrived - a bit of a maistro on the the guitar. I loooked forward to this!
The owner jammed on stage with a couple of the customers, who themselves were fairly tallented. At the completion of their songs I was invited on stage to play guitar. Woohoo! I've never really played in a bar before. Could this be the moment I've been waiting for my whole life - a kickstart to my musical career? I jumped on stage and played a few blues riffs, together with a song and an intro to Metallica's Nothing Else Matters. Well, I got an applause and a pat on the back from a few of the customers so I was happy with that.
The night continued with a few free beers and scotches as well as making friends with many a Japanese group who made their way through the bar at various times.
Eventually around 2:30AM I decided to call it quits. Personally, I think there could be no better way to say farewell to a country.
The next morning I walked to the International Shipping Terminal in the teaming rain, ready to board my ferry back to Korea.
In conclusion, Japan was a nice place. The people were very very courtious, the food was good and the scenery was quite beautiful. Overall I would describe what I saw as a regimented version of a Western City with people speaking Japanese.
I would like to return some day to explore the rural areas to get a different overview of the country. But for now "Sayonarah" Japan.
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