Tetsunabe Gyoza Restaurant (Fukuoka, Japan)

Well known in Fukuoka as the best gyoza restaurant in the area, this family owned and run restaurant serves the best dumplings I’ve ever eaten. Walk in, and you will be asked “How many people”. Indicate with your fingers how many people you have in your party and you’ll be lead to a table. Not much English is spoken here, but the staff knew to point to the picture of gyoza on the menu, there are plenty of other dining options too. If you order gyoza, you will be provided with a small dish to mix your own gyoza sauce – there is a squirty bottle of standard dumpling sauce, a small bottle of chili oil, a small dish of yuzu paste and a small dish of chili paste. Mix up your desired sauce, tasting as you go. I highly recomend the yuzu (an Asian sour citrus fruit) sauce, it adds an extra omph! to the meal.

Menu
The menu here is all in Japanese, but the staff here know what you’ve come for, so it’s not too difficult. The number one dish here is the gyoza (a small moon shaped fried Chinese dumpling), but there are plenty of other options too. The following are some of the dishes I remember.
  • ぎょうざ (Gyoza) – these small fried dumplings are amazing. Come as a serve of 8, the staff recommend two serves per person if you’re not getting anything else, 470 JPY per serve.
  • ポテトサラダ (Potato Salad) – one of the other main dishes, 520 JPY
  • 手羽先の煮 (Chicken Wings) – another popular dish, 310 JPY per piece
  • 令やしトマト (Cold Tomato) – a delicious dish of cold, slightly salted tomato and cabbage
  • おきゅうと
  • もろきゅう

Fukiya Okonomiyaki Restaurant (Fukuoka, Japan)

This cute restaurant is tucked in the corner of the restaurant floor of the Fukuoka Bus Centre. Walk in, and you will be asked “How many people”. Indicate with your fingers how many people you have in your party and you’ll be lead to a table. The waitress will then place a “menu” on your table – a receipt type piece of paper that lists everything in Japanese. Look below for translations (but be aware that the copy in the restaurant is purely Japanese!). Point to what you want, and they’ll start cooking it. You can watch your dinner being cooked over at the grill. If you order okonomiyaki, it will be bought to your table already cut into squares. Top with your preferred amount of okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise, and dig in!

No English is spoken here, but everyone is really friendly, the food is fabulous and cheap, and you can get a drink with your meal, perfect.

Menu
These are my translations, the menu at the restaurant is purely Japanese. Take note of what you’d like – I’ve set it out the same as the restaurant copy, so you should be able to point to what you want. All of the items on the left hand side are okonomiyaki – the Japanese “as-you-like-it” pancake, a thick savory pancake made of predominately of battered cabbage. My favourite is the corn/egg version, but they’re all great!

Name Price Name Price
デラックス (Delux) 1,100 JPY 焼きそば (Yaki Soba) 550 JPY
ミックス (Mix) 850 JPY “大盛 (large serve) 650 JPY
肉玉子 (Meat/Egg) 600 JPY 焼きうどん (Yaki Udon) 550 JPY
イカ玉子 (Squid/Egg) 600 JPY “大盛 (large serve) 650 JPY
エビ玉子 (Prawn/Egg) 600 JPY 焼きめし (Fried Rice) 550 JPY
チーズ玉子 (Cheese/Egg) 600 JPY “大盛 (large serve) 650 JPY
コーン玉子 (Corn/Egg) 600 JPY 肉野菜いため (Stir Fry) 550 JPY
肉 (Meat) 550 JPY “大盛 (large serve) 650 JPY
イカ (Squid) 550 JPY 御飯(小) (Small Rice) 550
エビ (Prawn) 550 JPY ビール(中)(Beer) 500 JPY
チーズ (Cheese) 550 JPY コーラ (Coke) 200 JPY
コーン (Corn) 550 JPY オレンジ (Orange Juice) 200 JPY
玉子 (Egg) 450 JPY ジンジャエール (Gingerale) 200 JPY
ヤサイ (Vegetable) 400 JPY

Introducing the Asian typhoon

Australasia ~ Australia ~ Victoria ~ Home and Asia ~ The Philippines ~ Manila and Asia ~ Japan ~ Fukuoka & Hiroshima

So much has happened, and yet nothing has happened since my last post – nearly 2 months ago! What can I say? Once again I’ve slipped into holiday mode, and have slacked off a bit on my blogging. Almost immediately after writing my last post, it was decided that I was needed back in Australia to help out the family business with our annual promotion. So we madly scrambled around to find a decent flight back to Australia at extremely short notice, and came up with a Philippine Air flight. “Hmmm, they seem to have a bad reputation”, mentioned mum. “FANTASTIC, I’ve never been to the Philippines”, I thought…

My two weeks back in Australia were full on, 12 hour days really take it out of you, but I did get to spend some time with my nephew, so it wasn’t all bad. And I managed to convince one of my friends to come back to Japan with me for a holiday. And so it was that Leah spent her very first typhoon locked up in a 4 star hotel in Manila with me, and her second ever typhoon madly riding through the wind to get to our favourite okonomiyaki restaurant…

People waiting to catch a train in amongst the typhoon

People waiting to catch a train in amongst the typhoon

We had a whirlwind 3 days in Manila on the way over to Japan from Melbourne… Day 1 we arrived at 6.30am, had a snooze then wandered around the streets – it was hot and humid, but bearable with a slight breeze… We talked about doing a tour the next day. Day 2 we decided to go shopping at the mall next to the hotel, as it was raining “a bit”. On the way out the door, we noticed the concierge had umbrellas – so we asked when they expected the rain to stop, to try and decide if we needed to get an umbrella. He said that the storm would start at 2pm (this was at about 10am). We assumed he made a mistake, he meant the storm would finish at 2pm, and headed through the torrential rain (a bit of a summer storm we assumed) to the nearby shopping centre. Wandered around the shopping centres for most of the day. At about 2pm the weather did indeed turn worse, terrible winds and rain. At this stage we still thought it was just a summer storm, we hadn’t heard the news. It wasn’t until we passed the Apple Store that we found out – it was closed, with a big sign up saying “Closed for the typhoon”. We started heading back to our hotel, it was bucketing down with rain everywhere, lines to get taxis and trains where huge (I’m not sure the trains were running). Luckily our hotel was right in the centre of town, so we just walked through the malls to get back. Not until we got to Japan did we realise just how bad it really was over there (we weren’t watching the news in Manila – we had plenty of DVD’s from the markets to get through!).

Leah surrounded by shopping in Manila

Leah surrounded by shopping in Manila

Leah and I spent a fantastic couple of weeks in Japan, running around visiting my favourite places. Amongst a bunch of things, we rode the shinkansen to Hiroshima, visited the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, the deers in Miyajima, Leah stayed in her first hostel in Hiroshima and we were interviewed by a Japanese TV station at Dazaifu, questioned about our ‘fashionable’ clothing (we were wearing jeans and thongs…). Leah was all set to come to our Wednesday English class, when our student SMS’d us to suggest we cancel the lesson, because of the approaching typhoon. Leah still wanted okonomiyaki for dinner, so we battled the winds to ride to our favourite restaurant despite the warnings… We were fine, and the typhoon ended up passing by us through the night, hopefully the typhoon’s are over for the year.

This red torii (gate) at the Itsukushima Shrine (Miyajima) welcomes visitors to the island - famous throughout Japan and the rest of the world. Deer all over the place...

This red torii (gate) at the Itsukushima Shrine (Miyajima) welcomes visitors to the island - famous throughout Japan and the rest of the world. Deer all over the place...

Leah’s now headed back home, and I’m left to, once again, find a job. Hmmm, better get on top of that 😉

Settling down

Asia ~ Japan ~ Fukuoka & Kurume

… and so it is that I am now renting my very first apartment, all by myself. Well, kinda.

Matt and I arrived in Fukuoka with our first two nights of accommodation booked, with the intention of finding an apartment straight away, or at the very least a cheaper hotel (Osaka was full of them, couldn’t be that hard, right?). Wrong! Fukuoka does not have cheap business hotels, the hotel we had found was the cheapest there was (and it was still a fair bit more than the hotels in Osaka). We spent our fist couple of days wandering around, determined to stumble upon a cheap hotel. In reality all we achieved was an amazing number of blisters and a thorough understanding of the backstreets of Fukuoka city. We quickly realised we needed to book a few more nights at our current hotel, but were only able to book 1 more night – the next night was the beginning of Obon. “Ahh, it’s ok, we’ll just have to pay a bit more at another hotel”, we thought. Wrong! The whole town was booked out.

Fukuoka's manmade beach

Fukuoka's manmade beach

Ikeda’s to the rescue! Luckily for us, my host family from Kurume was more than willing to put us up, and so we headed out to Kurume. Whilst in Kurume, we were fed the most delicious foods by my host mum and my host sister Sawako helped us in our search for an apartment. She took us back into the city, to a company that rents furnished apartments by the month (not a common practice here), and helped us sort out an apartment. Our apartment finder was Chinese, so between the limited English, Chinese and Japanese, we all communicated, and we now have a place to live.

Octopus for sale at the supermarket

Octopus for sale at the supermarket

After the apartment searching was done, we have a few days to lap it up at the Ikeda’s before venturing out on our own. As it is so incredibly hot over here (not so much hot, but humid), we haven’t really been stirring before dark. But after dark I took Matt out for bike rides around town, showing him all the places I used to hang out as an innocent 15 year old exchange student. A lot of the places are still there, but the town itself has changed considerably – the biggest change would have been “Ichi-Ban-Gai”, the main shopping strip – a new super mall has opened up on the outskirts of town, and as a result Ichi-Ban-Gai is all but dead, empty shops and not too many people about. Wednesday came about, bringing with it the opportunity to join Naoko’s calligraphy class with some of the ALT’s (foreign Assistant Language Teachers) from Kurume. As usual I started out with good intentions of what to write, by the end both Matt and I were drawing pretty little pictures with our calligraphy brushes.

Having dinner with Chris, an ALT from my time

Having dinner with Chris, an ALT from my time

On Thursday we headed to Kitakyushu to where Sawako is living, to see the fireworks festival. The festival has been going for quite a few years, and involves fireworks going off from either side of the bay. The fireworks themselves were deemed “short” by my host dad – they only went for 1.5 hours! After the fireworks, we headed back to an izakaya – a small hole in the wall bar – to chat to the bar tender about potential jobs in the area. Not many available it would appear…

Little girl watching the hanabi in her yukata

Little girl watching the hanabi in her yukata

Sawako helped us move into our new apartments on Sunday. As the girl, I got the “safer” upstairs apartment – I’m not sure I got the better deal, the stairs are a killer, really. Must not drink and then attempt those stairs, could be disastrous. The apartment itself is great – small but contains everything I need. I even have a loft! Comes complete with free internet and cable TV – problem is you can’t use both at the same time – I’m working hard on that one.

The main room in my apartment

The main room in my apartment

Since moving in, we have been exploring the area. We both have bikes (I inherited mine from an ALT who recently left Kurume, Matt has rehomed an abandoned bike from a previous tenant of our apartments) and have been using them non-stop. We are only about a 10min ride to Hakata, the main station in Fukuoka, and about a 15min to Tenjin, the other main station in Fukuoka. Great fun, but must be done after dark (due to the extremely strong sun and my lack of sunscreen). 100 yen shops are featuring alot in our travels (have basically furnished the apartment entirely from the high quality $2 shops). Next step – JOBS!

Take care all. I’m now here till at least Christmas – feel like visiting?