Exploring Nagasaki and Saga

This post is going to be about the trips that I made with my friend in Nagasaki and Saga during the beginning of February. I booked my hotel using Booking.com. We stayed at a small hostel named The Life Hostel which is really near to the Hakata station. The featured image of this post is the lobby area of the hotel which I find quite aesthetic and calming (when there are no people lol). I, unfortunately, didn’t take any pictures of my room as it was a shared room with 5 other people. I did take a picture of the kitchen area, which I find really nice as it provides all the cooking utensils for your personal use.

We stayed there for the duration of our trip and I must say it was a really pleasant experience (minus the noisy neighbors)!

We went to Nagasaki on our first day. This is my second time visiting the historical city after my previous visit in summer last year. And since it was almost Chinese New Year, we dropped by the china town to see all the decorations that had been set up.

You can find a lot of Chinese inspired snacks and restaurants in the alley. It’s really recommended that you visit this spot near the CNY since they will put the decorations out for display only during those times.

This is also my second time visiting the Glover Garden since my friend really wanted to enter, so I had no choice but to follow her inside haha. The entrance fee was quite expensive around 6o0ish yen for adults, which in my opinion, is a bit overkill. But I guess the view you get from the top of the house is worth looking at.

We also visited the Atomic Bomb Museum as well as the Peace Park which are the iconic tourist sites for Nagasaki. I didn’t take any pictures of it since I did during the previous visit. I did post it on my Instagram so you can check it if you’re interested.

We visited Saga on our second day. Saga prefecture wasn’t really well known within the Japanese community and thus was not a lot of people visit this place for tourism. We visited Kashima, a city in the prefecture which is famous for their Yutoku-Inari Shrine. I alone have never heard of this shrine but I must say that it’s a really majestic and beautiful shrine.

You can access the shrine by first taking the JR train that stops at the Hizen-Kashima station. From there you can purchase a roundtrip ticket for the bus that is bound for the shrine. Beware that the bus only comes once an hour so you may have to do some planning if you hate waiting that long. After you get off at the bus stop, you must walk around another 5-8 minutes to reach the shrine.

Kashima city is even more rural than Beppu (the place I’m living in Japan). There are literally no skyscrapers and you can see the whole city from the top of the shrine. As I do not possess a super expensive camera to take the view, I tried to take a panorama from my iPhone.

I always try to go to a shrine every year to take one of this omikujis (a.k.a Japanese fortune-telling paper). These papers will tell your luck for the whole year which you can read more about here. I got a ‘future blessing’ for this year. Unfortunately, due to the lack of Japanese understanding, I thought that it was a bad luck lol. I did understand the rest of the contents written in the paper, but I did not know that those two characters in the middle meant a good thing.

Normally only people with ‘bad luck’ written on their paper would tie the fortune on these ropes. But as I misunderstood the words, my friend told me to tie my paper. Lol. Good thing I’m not a type of person who believes in these kinds of superstitions that much otherwise I’d be rolling over my bed knowing that I had sent my good blessings away by mistake.

Next time I’d be super careful and Google everything up before making mistakes again. Haha.

While my trip to Nagasaki and Saga wasn’t smooth (rain ruined it all), I was glad that I made the decision to step out and explore more about the places around me. I hope my post somewhat entertains you and motivates you to explore Japan too!