Wandering back through the rain in the darkened city is always tricky because places look so different at night, navigation becomes more difficult. I am really deep down tired so I had to give my journey my fullest concentration and at some point an old lady overtook me. She wasn’t running, she wasn’t on wheels but she fairly sailed past me. It had to have been at that moment I realised just how slow I must have been walking and while coming to terms with the humilation I promptly headed down a whole new road. Big road too. Long. It was after I passed two huge and incredibly well lit garages that I realised what that woman had done. Despite her efforts though I made it back in one rain-sodden piece.

The internet at the office can be quick, dead slow or dead. Most of the time it’s the middle one it seems. So with that as the excuse… :) Went to find somewhere to play pachinko with Ned this morning. Apparently games can be had for 1 yen/ball but all we found were 4 yen/ball. 1 yen = 0.00734745 GBP according to xe.com but I don’t know what the arcades were like because you’d need a good one to be comfortable playing in I suppose. So we passed on that. I needed to buy the girls something and off to do that we went. It’s not very touristy around here – which is a good thing – so that was a failed project. Back to the office and shortly after we went to Fukuoka City Hall for lunch. Big cafeteria space and for the number of people there it was – like the traffic – much quieter than the same number of people in the UK. I went to 3 small dishes of food so I got more tastes to eat and while I have no idea what some of it was every part was eaten and tasted great. The cake was excellent – sponge cake with green tea icing. I could eat a whole lot more of that. Back to the office we went.

I sort of had plans for Sunday and Canal City had been suggested as a place for possible buying I need to do. Naoko found me the places to go so I headed out into the ever increasing rain. The place isn’t so far away and I got there to see a really large group of girls queuing to get into an area that had been set aside. A HMV (the record co.) guy was there with a stack of CD’s, couple of poster’s with the group on and a guy up front with the mic doing what I can only assume was a warm-up for this band. And again the girls were pretty quiet. All this reserved behaviour is odd. Nice though. Anyway, nothing in the stores so I gave up and came back.

We had planned to eat at a yatai again tonight but once back and in front of the laptop tiredness really did kick in. Not just eyes wanting to close but whole body wanting to sleep. Ned, Naoko and Noel were in some meeting with others – I have no clue who or why – so I sent a message and said goodbye to Yasu (he’s a java programmer at nulab and had suggested the spicy noodles the other day) at the office. He is off at the weekend and will not be at Wordcamp but asked if I would like to head out on Sunday with him – and I absolutely agreed. He asked where I wanted to go and I said he could choose so midday Sunday we are meeting outside the office and off to new places I shall head. That will be really excellent.

There is a brand of chocolate bar here that is wrapped in foil and then where we would have paper they use a card box. What is amusing about that is the fact the box has instructions on how to open it. Why would you put that on? Surely you have to credit the customer? Not like they’ll buy some chocolate in a container they cannot get into is it :) But maybe it’s a law too …. who knows. One of those things that I find amusing but if they were in the UK they would find more reason to laugh.

Wordcamp tomorrow. I have my 5 minutes planned.

I think I said sleep could wait. It can’t. An early night tonight should mean I can enjoy the next 2 days more and that really is more important. It’s friday, it’s 20:37 and I’m heading to do the ‘sleep soundly and wake up feeling refreshed and full of beans’ thing.