Chuseok | Osaka Day 1

Chuseok, or rather, 추석 is the Korean thanksgiving/harvest festival that takes place over the course of 3 days on the "15th day of the 8th lunar month". It's a national holiday, so this year it fell on the 8th of September, conveniently giving us an extended weekend from the 6th to the 10th.

We actually didn't realise that Chuseok was coming up until someone at Nick's school asked about his plans for the holiday, so we jumped to work and booked a holiday to Osaka about a week or so before we actually flew out. I'm so amazed that my time in Korea is giving me the opportunity to do these crazy last-minute ventures.

We flew out on the 6th, and because time is wibbly wobbly and even more so when it comes to time zones, I sent out a birthday "card" to my Nan while we were waiting for the airport bus. Ahhh, technology.

I really enjoy airports. There's actually a lot to do in Incheon airport, and they've really worked hard to make it look good so it's not just a big grey boring building. We'd been warned about crazy Chuseok traffic, so we'd left really early to be safe...and encountered no more traffic than usual. So we ended up with quite a while to spare.

I've decided I must be the reincarnated form of the God of Lost Things, because I swear at least once a month I find something important that someone's lost, from cellphones to bank cards, and this time it was a passport with boarding passes inside, just sat on the floor. We handed it to a member of staff and they disappeared for a while, but ended up just coming back and putting it on a table next to where we found it. Uh. Okay then.

Waiting rooms.

We flew with Peach, an airline with overpoweringly magenta branding. The plane exterior and some of the interor upholstery is various shades of bright pink and purple, the airline attendants wear magenta uniforms, and even the airline safety materials are the same shade of Barbie pink. (Confusingly, nothing is actually PEACH coloured.)

Calpis. Funny to say, yummy to drink.

Fukuoka Visa Run: Day 7

The face of someone who is too hot and too tired

The final day! Since we'd gotten sidetracked on our walk starting in Hakata, we decided to finish it today.

As we'd already been to Hakata, we went straight to point 3 on the walk, which was Rakusui-en. It was very close to our hotel anyway, so it was quite convenient to be able to skip the walk to Hakata Station. For 300 yen we could look around the little oasis of calm, as well as partake in a little tea ceremony (with proper green tea and Japanese sweets).

It looked so funny, walking along a street lined with towering office blocks and apartments, to suddenly spot a cluster of trees bursting up towards the sky, just about hemmed in by a pretty wall all the way around. Hidden inside was the Teahouse. All of a sudden the painfully hot sun was blocked out and replaced by cool, leafy shade and pretty dappled patches of light. It looked deserted, but it turns out it's just the overall calm, quiet nature of the place, and two lovely ladies were waiting inside a little office ready to take our money and give us a green tea voucher to use whenever we were ready.

The garden is quite small, but just the right size to have a relaxing stroll, and there are benches dotted around that you can sit on while you watch the koi swim around and make comforting 'bloop' noises over the gentle rush of a small waterfall. It was fun to imagine people hundreds of years ago doing something similar.