Kumamoto Promenade and Crushing Disappointment

After our few days of kicking it in Kagoshima, we were off to Kumamoto in the central area of Kyushu for three nights. Kumamoto is famous for one of the best castles in Japan, and it also has a zoo and some museums and such.

One of the first things we did when we got there, in order to find food, was to walk around a nearby shopping promenade, where we found a restaurant with a statue of a really ecstatic chef (although for some reason we never ate at the restaurant). Naturally when you see a statue with a funny pose, you take a picture of yourself and/or someone else mimicking it. So that's what we did. Except at first Ed's camera was set to video when he handed it to me.

Then I reset it to photo capture, but notice the anguish and desperation in Ed's face as he tries to copy what must seem like a very complicated pose.

And then there's me. First time. Nailed it.

I kinda wanted to try again to really get all the angles right and to open my joyful mouth a bit wider, but by then the whole thing was getting old, and a lot of people had been staring judgily at us for a few minutes. So we moved on.

Somewhere in the promenade was a mochi shop that was attracting a lot of tourists. "Mochi" usually gets translated into English as "rice cake," but it's not the kind of rice cake that we think of when we imagine diet food. It's more of a squishy, tasteless rice dough, which is used in ball form in soups, or it can be filled with sweet red bean paste (gag me with a spoon) as a confection, and it's used in lots of other awful Japanese foods. This shop makes mochi in the traditional way, which involves pounding the dough with giant wooden mallets, which they let tourists do. So that's worth a stop. Here are a couple videos of me pounding the mochi and then getting a little gift of mochi (which I later threw away because it's gross) from the shop.

Now, had I known a key fact that I did not know before booking this whole vacation, I would not have booked this vacation, and we would have gone to Thailand or something. The key fact is that seemingly every public place of tourism, such as museums, zoos, aquariums, and castles, close over New Year's for at least two or three days. But sometimes as long as two weeks. We caught a little of this in Kagoshima when we tried to go to the art museum and it was closed. But we didn't realize the extent of it until we got to Kumamoto.

After a bunch of walking around our first evening there, and getting supper and so forth, we went back to the hotel to make a plan for the next two days. But then we found out that the main attraction, Kumamoto Castle, had been open for the last day of the year on that day, and we missed it. It wouldn't reopen until after we were gone. Then we found out that all the museums we wanted to go to were also closed until after we were gone. The only major tourist attraction that was open was the Kumamoto Zoo and Botanical Gardens, and we were lucky to catch that, because the next day would be the last day open before closing for a few days.

So next time I'll talk about the zoo. It was pretty cool.