Hakata - Even Further South

Closer to Seoul than to Tokyo
Our final destination was Hakata, the main city in Fukuoka, the southern-most island in Japan.  It has a different feel than any of the other places we visited.  It's normal.  This is a back-handed compliment, I guess.  There are no great historical buildings to see, no well-known temples and the cutesie kawai culture is muted.  It seemed like a regular city full of regular people, far from the capital's trendiness.

It's built on the seafront but we stayed further inland along a river.  We did a lot of walking and ate well.  The area is known for their ramen, called tonkatsu, whose broth is made from pork-bone.  We of course had some, but the best eating experience was this one.

Like Osaka to the north, Hakata is bike crazy.  You can ride your bikes everywhere, park them underground and they have a cool contraption to help you take your bike back above ground.

It's a bike escalator.  It's inert until you place your front wheel onto the belt and then it revs up and transports your bike up the steps.  This is Japan in a nutshell to me.  They use ingenuity to make things easier and promote bike riding to boot.