17 April 2025
Not rice not noodles
Kumamoto station area
Instead of catching the tram to the main station area, I walked along the tram tracks. This probably annoyed the tram drivers.
The journey on foot takes about 30 minutes, I feel that with the old trams it takes about 20 minutes, and you are trapped on board with 80 or so people with terminal sneezing. So my top tip is, walk.
Even better, to go between the main station and the city centre, you can also follow the drain, and we all know how much I love a drain.
As for the main station area, it is just the station and the one shopping building attached to it. The surrounding streets have nothing of interest, other than the drain. So you better like what is on offer to eat in the station itself. You can get the usual choices of rice or noodle based things, but can you get something that contains neither?
Not everywhere in Kumamoto is shabby, there are numerous flower beds on street corners.
I have no idea what this grey monolithic building is, a similar windowless building in central Melbourne is a water pump.
After no more than a 30 minute walk, here is the Kumamato station area, although you cannot see the actual station in this shot, but stay tuned.
IC cards (suica, icoca etc.) are being phased out in favour of tap to pay credit cards in a few parts of Japan, this works fine for me, I have an international fee free credit card, but I am not sure how well that works if you do not, I read that Americans seem to have a lot of issues, as tap to pay is not even a thing there yet? You can also use apple pay on an iphone, but no android pay unless the phone was made for the Japanese market specifically, because... Japan and it's many hoops to jump through for extra convenience.
The station building itself has many tourist stores and restaurants.
Here is my dinner which contains neither rice or noodles, hamburg steak. There was a whole story involved on a giant sheet of paper. The meal was ok, I was most interested in the baked potato. As a general rule, any meal that involves a giant piece of paper explaining how good it is, is probably not worth the effort.
The adjoining multi level shopping building was very nice, lots of little stores, but also a common eating area in the middle of them to eat the cakes and whatever you just bought.
The supermarket was also very good, I bought nothing, but handled many products and put them back.
One of the above photos had an overpass, and I was waiting for it to be time for me to go up the overpass, the time has arrived. Station on the right, multi level shopping centre on the left.
I walked back along the local drain. Here is the view looking back in the direction of Kumamoto station.
And finally, once I got back to this very wide Shotengai, I knew I was back at my hotel.
Tomorrow is a hiking day, it is going to be hot too!