This morning we decided to head out to a nearby cafe for a “morning set” for breakfast. We didn’t make it to the cafe we were headed to as we got stopped in our tracks by a delicious looking bakery. We decided we could not resist their pastry goodness and headed in. Steve got a Pistachio croissant and a adzuki bean and butter bread roll thing and I got a “marble” croissant and a pistachio cornet. I wanted everything in the there though, it all looked so good. Oh we got coffee too, of course.

We headed off to Hakata station to sort out some rail tickets and to do a bit of shopping. Bought some things at (Tokyo) Hands, mostly kitchen/bento supplies. The range of things here is so vast compared to at home and very reasonably priced. It’s really hard not to just buy all the things.

After shopping for a while we started to get hungry, so we decided after the success if yesterday’s “bento in the park”, that we would head to a different park in search of Sakura.

We went and purchased some delicious looking bento and an amazing looking strawberry sandwich and hopped on the subway bound for Nishi Park.

Nishi park was pretty cool and there was some Sakura blooming. We were starving by this stage so we sat down amongst the *almost* flowering Sakura and enjoying these really, really, really tasty bento. So good.

Oh and then I had my equally amazing strawberry sando. Oishii!!!!

After lunch we wandered around the park a bit and we even managed to to see the ocean. We considered walking down to the coast, but decided against it. Too much walking.

Nice park, and lots of people picnicking. Would’ve been even nicer in full bloom. We were in need of a coffee by now so decided to head back to this little cafe we saw on the walk up to the park. It was quite busy when we got there, but we managed to work out the system with the help of my “sukoshi nihongo” and a friendly staff member. There was a bit of a wait for a table, but we were happy to wait. I was only going to get a coffee, on account of having devoured a large strawberry sandwich mere hours earlier, but look, when you walk in to a cute cafe and there is strawberry shortcake on offer, it is very hard to resist. I got the strawberry shortcake and Steve got a chocolate cake. We waited outside on a bench until they called us to tell us our table was ready. We sat upstairs and they brought the coffee and cakes out to us and omg it was just all so cute and amazing, I really don’t know how Japan does it sometimes.

We decided to go back to the hotel for a bit, drop off our shopping and use the onsen facilities before heading back out for dinner. We have been trying to have a ramen since we got here, but kept eating other things instead, so tonight was ramen night. We decided to go to a place called Shin Shin ramen in the Tenjin district.

Tenjin station was really quite cool and yes, had a lot of shops, so we checked out a few places first. We to our favourite shop Loft and bought some cute kitchen ware from a random kitchen sale we stumbled across.

We also checked out Hobby Off to see if there was any nerdy things we needed to buy and stumbled across some Purika photo booths and decided we needed to get one for old times sake ha ha We had a lot of laughs doing this – it puts all these effects on your face like big eyes etc and it just kind of makes you lot freaky. Love it!

By this stage we were quite hungry so we set off to find this ramen place. It wasn’t far away, but there was quite a queue – but this is a good sign right? We joined the queue and waited probably 40 minutes to get in. But it was worth it. Very delicious ramen.

After dinner we wandered around the Tenjin area a bit, went in to a Taito station arcade and Steve attempted to play the train driving game. He didn’t crash the train, so that was nice, but it was a bit tricky being in Japanese and all.

Then we wandered back to our hotel via the Nakasu district and saw some of the many Yatai food stalls that set up every night. it was really busy around there.