Bound for Fukuoka, Japan
Last month T had 2 weeks of Spring Break. The weather during the holiday was mostly cold or super cold. Very uncommon for late March weather.
But, we still decided to go somewhere. For the past few months T has been mentioning that she wants to go for a ride on a Shinkansen, she’s never been on one so this looked like a good opportunity.
I quickly looked through the options and decided to take the Hello Kitty Shinkansen to Fukuoka. Not sure what was I thinking when I booked a 4 hours train ride, but I did it.
I bought the tickets from the Shinkansen office in our city - I don’t recommend you doing this, the queues are often long, the staff don’t speak English, they ask million questions, they issue you 300 tickets for a one way ride (joke - they issue 4 unnecessary tickets) that you can’t figure out why you need all of them.
Luckily I had a friend that mentioned that I can buy the return tickets from the ticket machine at the station - which sounded - easy. And yes it was, super easy, no queue. Just straight forward ticket machine in English that lets you choose absolutely everything.
Now let me get to the Hello Kitty Shinkansen, Its cute and thats it. The exterior of the train is adorable, Car no. 1 has small shop with little cute Hello Kitty souvenirs and Car no. 2 called “Kawaii” has Hello Kitty photo station and cute covers on the chairs, and it is non-reserved. The rest of the train is same as any other trains.
I noticed that many people entered in Shin-Osaka and went out at Shin-Kobe - just one stop. Pretty smart idea. They went in the train, took pictures, bought some souvenirs and went out on the next stop. I highly recommend doing that if you just want to go in and see how it looks. Being on that particular train going to destination far away it’s just not worth it.
After 4 long hours and 57 Disney movies, we made it. Not sure why but I had this impression that Fukuoka is supposed to be warmer than Hyogo - well it wasn’t. It was snowing when we reached. We got taxi and went straight into the hotel. The good thing was that we were in the city center and could easily walk around museums, shops and restaurants.
We stayed in Il Palazzo hotel, pretty newly renovated with a nice kid friendly buffet and huge spacious rooms. Later on I found out that this hotel was built in 1989 by the famous Italian Architect Aldo Rossi, and had very nice interior, like a dream for a photographer!
We stayed only 3 days there, visited the art center, walked around the city and took loads of pictures, complained about the weather and ate a lot. Oh and yes, we went back by the Nozomi Shinkansen and it took 2.5 hours only to reach Kobe so, yes book Nozomi if you are taking Shinkansen on your next long ride 😉.
It was great, but I would love to go back again maybe by car with my husband and see around the area a bit more. Kumamoto is close to Fukuoka and it has mind blowing nature so that’s next on the list.
Sanïa Spiri is a Documentary Photographer based in Hyogo, Japan.
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