One Heluva Birthday!

To celebrate both of our birthdays we headed to Fukuoka (aka Hakata). Fukuoka is the nearest “big city” to Sasebo. It has been recommended numerous times by our students as the best place to go shopping. Since we were told there was no home baseball game, we had no specific plans. We just decided to go for a change in scenery.
There was an 80% chance of rain for our first day in Fukuoka and it rained indeed. However it was light enough that it didn’t deter us from walking to Fukuoka Tower. At 234 meters, it is the tallest seaside tower in Japan and also the symbol of Fukuoka. It has an observation floor at 123 meters.

Nick and I were both surprised by the strange feeling we had in the elevator. Since the building is hollow we were able to see all the beams that make up the infrastructure on our way up and it didn’t make us feel so good in our tummies.

I mentioned to the ticket counter staff that it was my birthday and it turns out there’s no entrance fee on your birthday. I even got a postcard as my gift.

The view was not spectacular, visibility was short due to the weather, but we got to see where the Yahoo! Dome (where the baseball games are held) was. That was our next stop, "Hawks Town". We wanted to visit the Dome and checkout the schedule for home games for the Softbank Hawks (Japanese Professional Baseball team, and 2005 Champions). Notice how in Japan the name of the city is not part of the baseball team's name, instead it's the sponsor...SoftBank. Adjacent to the Dome there's "Hawks Town" which consists of two malls and to our surprise one Toys R' Us and one Hard Rock Cafe. We knew we had to have dinner there to continue tradition. Nick hit the Toys R' Us in search of a "Vortex" football (hey Tim!) while I went clothes shopping. After a couple of hours of walking around we went to dinner at Hard Rock. We were overwhelmed by the menu and wanted to overload on familiar food. We finally opted for the Herb Grilled Chicken with caramelized onions served on top of garlic mashed potatoes and I had the grilled BBQ salmon served with garlic mashed potatoes and BBQ beans. Needless to say we stuffed ourselves.
On our way out of Hard Rock I noticed that there seemed to be a small crowd going towards the Dome. We both looked at each other like, "Could there possibly be a game tonight?". As we made our way to the escalator we were stopped by a "ticket scalper" who offered us two tickets. With my broken Japanese we were able to score two tickets, original price 5300 Yen each, for 5000 Yen total (nice savings!). We had no idea where the seats where or if the tickets were even real.
We were pleasantly surprised to find that our seats were actually great. Regardless of our great seats, we were thrilled just to be inside.
During the game we started noticing a few differences from games back home. We were surprised to see people with kegs on their backs selling draft beer without you having to leave your seats...what a concept! Also interesting is the fact that they don't price-gouge for beer. We will try to find out if we can get our hands on one of these backpacks to take home with us.

Another interesting addition was the crowd chanting to the beat of large Japanese drums and brass instruments in right field. Most notable, however, was their form of a 7th-inning stretch. Instead of stretching and singing "Take me out to the ball game", everyone buys long yellow balloons and uses them as part of a chant.

At the end of the chant there's a countdown on the big screen and they all let their balloons go at the same time.

Since the Hawks won there was a victory chant at the end followed by the release of white balloons, dancing cowgirl cheerleaders, and finally indoor fireworks. This was a great end to our plan-free Birthday!