Getting to know Kagoshima

An early 8:00am start, the itinerary included: Amu Shopping Centre, Ferris Wheel and the Shimboya Observatory.

We were missing 2 essential items, including an adapter to enable us to charge our electronics from a Japanese socket. A minor oversight meant that we had bought an English-European plug. Unfortunately, we could only find a European-Japanese plug, so all future charges have to be done via the 3 plug pile up. It looks like a health and safety nightmare but we're quite impressed at our own resourcefulness.

Walking into the Amu Shopping Centre is like receiving a sensory overload. There is every kind of shop available: cosmetics, clothes, instrumental shops, music shops, home wear, games arcades, restaurants, a cinema, a waterfall, and a room dedicated to themed photo booths. There is music and lights everywhere and you can barely focus on one thing before you are distracted by the novelty of the next.

Having been distracted by all this hubub for long enough, we made our way to the 6th floor of the shopping centre to hop onto the rooftop ferris wheel. Emma is getting quite the knack of deciphering all the Japanese ticket booths etc. It was such a beautiful view from the wheel and we could see all the sights of the city.

After a shopping/ferris wheel frenzy, we'd worked up an appetite to try our first Japanese restaurant experience. Most of the restaurants have pictures of the food they serve and plastic model displays to show what's on offer. Somehow, although this may seem extremely helpful, we still accidently found ourselves in a pork specialist restaurant. Even with the helpful staff and an English menu, we still weren't 100% sure that Emma's dinner was entirely vegetarian.

There was green tea a-go-go- FREE! A free sesame seed paste appetiser- it looked suspicious but we ate it so as not too seem rude. It was actually quite nice- Emma did a down-in-one with it before she lost her confidence. We received some instruction and some laughs at our use of chopsticks. We are slowly getting the hang of it out of necessity. The whole dining experience was great and unbelievably good value!!!

We moved on and navigated ourselves on the bus to the Shimboya Observation Point which over looked the city and volcano. It's hard to convey how beautiful it was there, so we will just insert a few of our pictures:

Then off back to Kagoshima Central where we treated ourselves to a cheeky Starbucks! We felt a bit naughty but you can't beat those home comforts!

Pit stop at the Family Mart to pick up some dinner and then back to our hostel for the evening for some socialising. We have a really mixed group here, speaking various languages but all communicating in English to different degrees (lucky us!!) This is us outside our hostel: