門司港（Mojiko)

When I was in Kokura, we went to Mojiko!

It's a little harbor and because I guess a lot of foreignors used to come, some of the architecture and designs of buildings reflect that.

This is the old train station (JR門司港駅）:

Isn't it all cute and old and retro??

Water feature in front of the station must be fun for the kids in summer :)

Even the inside of the station's all retro~


We also went to Mojiko Retro Observation Tower (門司港レトロ展望室）which is just behind a library symbolizing the friendship ties between Dalian in China with Kita Kyushu. The library is called 国際友好記念図書館 (Kokusai Yuko Kinen Toshokan).

This is the view from the top of the tower, I think the ticket was 300yen.

We saw banana men!

Guessing they're some famous comedians..



And we passed Moji Mitsui Club （旧門司三井倶楽部) - Einstein and his wife stayed here before. Now, it's a restaurant, event hall and memorial.

There are lots of places to visit and see in Mojiko! Tons more we haven't explored. To find out more click here. Really good site! More info in Japanese than English.


Of course we also went around window shopping!Found a shop where we could sample fish and fugu (pufferfish)!

These are actually real (dead of course) pufferfish! Isn't the big one huge? Even bigger than our faces. The tiny one inside's a real one too.

Also discovered this cute shop called hacomo - they use old boxes to cut out shapes that you can use to make different shapes! The armor you see below was for Children's Day (boy's day actually).

Saw the same shop in Yufuin, which I will blog about later:

I also ate this awesome thing on a stick which was ebi (shrimp) wrapped in deep fried toast (食ってんかのえびパン）! Ohmygosh it tasted so good! おいしかった！...I highly recommend it! It wasn't really near the shops, it was near the bridge near the observation tower.