After Tsuwano I headed south a couple hours to Fukuoka (Tenjin) and met up with a friend in the area. She very graciously showed me around and let me not have to worry about deciphering the transit system here. We stumbled into a Yabusume (horse mounted archery) display, then took a waterway/canal cruise in Yanagawa 柳川. According to Wikipedia, in the 80s Studio Ghibli made an animated documentary on the history of Yanagawa's waterways. The sakura are in full bloom down here in Kyushu so there were plenty of hanami parties going on. Hanami means "cherry blossom viewing" but in reality it's, "cherry blossom viewing while sitting on a blue tarp and drinking (with some eating and activities for the kids). Some kind old drunk gentlemen even invited me to join them while we passed by on the river tour (2nd hanami invite that day, I stand out here apparently). We passed a 3 boat long wedding party on the tour making it the 2nd wedding I've randomly run across here.
Yanagawa is also famous for its unagi so afterwards we had some unagi then met up with a few of her friends for a good dinner at an Izakaya near my hotel. The night was almost entirely in Japanese so a lot of it was hard to understand but it was still really fun (2 people mostly fluent in Japanese and English, one Japanese only speaker, and me). Oh, and her friends knew what cat cafe's are and pointed out that there was at least one in the area so it's apparently not just an Akihabara thing!
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