Visa Walk, Stumble, and Run

Ok, so I'm sitting here in my hotel room in Fukuoka, hoping to dear God that I'll make it back tomorrow. I somehow forgot to get an itinerary before I left the office yesterday, but from what I understand, my flight is supposed to leave at 10:30 AM. The only problem is that the visa office doesn't open until 10, and it's a real crap shoot if my passport will be ready by then. The other issue is that my flight was with Japan Airlines, but operated through Korean Air, so there was no way to check my itinerary for tomorrow and change the flight today. We'll see what happens, and I'm going to just hope and pray that it all works out.
Today, however, has been a blast. I woke up on time, found a great taxi driver who was willing to attempt to communicate with me. I feel like such a nimrod sometimes, not knowing the language, but coming to Japan has shown me just how friendly Koreans are and how much I'm already getting their culture and understanding, if not words, at least sentiments and general ideas.
Once we got to Yeongdeungpo Station, the taxi driver pulled in front of the airport limousine, and blocked it so that I could make the 5:20 departure. It's called a limousine, but it's really just a nice bus with huge leather seats and great Air Con. I proceeded to sit and read most of the way to the airport as the sun rose and wound up getting there at about 6:25, give or take. The airport is way more intense going out than coming in, because there's so much more to do. Koreans LOVE duty free shopping, and since the terminal did not have any domestic flights whatsoever, they've built an entire duty free mall in the airport. Fortunately, I do not have an intense craving for duty free shopping as of yet, so I was able to slide by.
Once at the terminal, I met a few other ESL teachers doing the same thing I was and we got breakfast and started chatting about how long, where, and why we were in Korea. They were some pretty cool people and we all pretty much stuck together the whole day. One was just doing exit and entry (I think her name was Jen) and we split off from her around midday. We travelled to the embassy in a party of six, and I led the way because I had the most idiot-proof directions.
Once we got there, I realized that I hadn't brought my passport-size pictures, or rather, my school had neglected to give them to me. I sent them with my original documents back in July, and assumed that those would be the photos I'd take with me for the visa run. Fortunately, I was able to get my picture taken in the booth right inside the embassy for 600 yen. There were also plenty of other things I didn't really know, like my employer's phone number and my own address (I know, I've been promising to get it forever now). Fortunately, this isn't the strictest process in the world and they already have so much information on me by now that they probably know more about my contract, employment, and Korean habits than I do. All in good fun, I say.
So we dropped off our passports and headed across the street to check out the wonderful Hawks Town Mall, which included some great Western stores and an arcade place where we wound up going bowling. I won with a score of 78, so you can guess how pro we all were. We really just needed to kill time until 3 PM when we could check into hotels.
The cool thing about bowling in Japan is that you get shoes by depositing a token into the shoe-vending-locker-thingies. We had to give it a couple of goes because none of us knew our foot size in centimeters off-hand. We wound up doing alright and Carson, one of the guys with us, won a bag of spicy beef soup-flavored corn curls. I tried one. They are just as amazing as they sound, really, they are.
Shopping in Japan is really cool. I wound up buying nothing, but saw very few things I didn't like. I would have never thought I'd really want a hoodie from a Nike store, but the way design works in Japan is pretty amazing. I wanted a lot of things, but fortunately I've been spoiled by living in Korea, where most things are fairly inexpensive. Japan is anything but inexpensive.
So after bowling, we went to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe, where I had Macaroni and Cheese with Chicken and enjoyed an Alabama Slammer for old-times' sake. It was intensely filling and utterly bizarre to have a western sized portion set in front of me. We truly eat like pigs.
After the meal came the panic attack. As we walked up to pay, Rhiannon, a teacher from London, realized that her wallet was gone. The madness that ensued and the number of possible exit scenarios that played through my head were a bit overwhelming, but in the end, I wound up finding it on the bar where we'd waited for the table at Hard Rock. After, of course, running wildly back to the bowling alley and preparing to find the British consulate. Anyway, disaster averted, and international crisis held at bay for another day.
Finally, it was approaching 3, so we headed for the subway, which, by the way, is another supercool thing in Japan. Every subway stop has an avatar, so the Korean consulate is a piece of pottery, while another is a flower, and another a running anime boy, and so on. It's really cool, though, because it's almost impossible to miss where you're going or to get too far down the wrong track, which we would've done at one point today.
We got to the hotel and headed off to our rooms for naptime. Three in the afternoon is really late when you've woken up at five and hopped across the Sea of Japan, so we all passed out until around seven when we woke up to go exploring and find dinner. We wound up wandering for a while because none of us really knew what we were doing. Carson had been to Fukuoka before, but proved to be less of a resource than Rhiannon. Raechel and I were both newbies, so we just tagged along and I tried my best to keep them accountable to a compass at least.
We wound up on Canal Street, which is a bit like a red light district, but a lot less in-your-face about things. Since none of us were Japanese men in business suits, we were accepted as crazy foreigners wandering around. Japan is so much rougher than Korea for people who don't know the language, but we all used our masterful ESL skills to mime just about anything we needed and sought out restaurants with picture-menus. In the end we found a lovely Japanese noodle-shack and had a pretty good dinner. Mine wound up having more seafood in it than I'd expected from the lacquered model of the dish in the window, but was pretty decent nonetheless.
We wandered back to the subway and rode home to the hotel, and here I am. Carson and Rhiannon (who work for the same school but hadn't yet met) were booked in the same hotel by their school, and Raechel and I both were left to make our own reservations, so we got a room at the same place as the other two. It's definitely not home, and unlike Korea, there's nothing on TV in English. I also stupidly assumed that Japan would have the same plugs as Korea, but instead it has US plugs! There's also no wireless, so this won't be posted until tomorrow night (if I get home). There were PJs in the room and the pillow is, well, bizarre along with the bathroom. Unfortunately, the Air Con in the room is so dry that it's aggravated my cold.
Enough for now. Here are the pictures I took today with my cell phone (my American one–see? it's good for something...hah). If you want to know what the picture is, click it. They're labeled on photobucket.
Hope all is well,
Love,
Joe