Fukuoka (pronounced Hoo-Kyu-Oka, dad: stop embarrassing the travel agents)

Maybe it's the fact that my hair colour now matches my eyebrows, maybe it's because I keep looking over the top of a map at the sky as if it's going to help me, maybe it's because I'm the only Westerner I've seen outside of the Youth Hostel in two days (they're all in there, eating crisps and watching Rocky VII); for whatever reason, Fukuoka appears to be trying to adopt me. I can't move for kindly strangers trying to take me under their wing: bus drivers, acting as a personal, free taxi service (shouting "this is Hakata Station!" in English and then waving me through without a ticket); kindly old ladies, approaching me as soon as I get off the bus to ask if they can help me get somewhere, anywhere; romantic couples, waving shyly at me through the sakura blossoms as I walk past; young girls accidentally sending me to the wrong bus stops and beaming at me while I wait to sneak back across the road; old men smiling at me for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I buy a coffee, and the people in Starbucks seem genuinely delighted; I eat curry, and there is an excited buzz throughout the restaurant. If every city has a personality - and, of course, it does - Fukuoka, even in the pouring rain as it is today, seems to be the busty, bustling neighbour who brings round hotpot and then plays Poker with you and lets you win.

Even my brand new, free hotel (paid for while I teacher-train for four days) is delightful. Okay, so I can't steal the hand-towels and bed linen and dressing gowns because they've all got Comfort Hotel monogrammed on every corner, and my radiator sounds a lot like it's on a runway about to take off, but I have complimentary coffee, internet, shower facilities and a Japanese television that I don't understand at all but is really entertaining anyway. Plus I've got a view - of sorts - and access to as many free films as I want, courtesy of the clever people who sit at the back of cinemas and film through holes in their popcorn buckets and then upload it onto the internet.

Nothing, though, told me as much about Fukuoka as the gentleman who walked me across the road this morning. Having just dropped my bags off at the hotel, the reception staff had photocopied a map for me (without being asked: they were trying to adopt me too, I suspect), and they had then drawn little circles around the hotel location and where I was supposed to be going for my initial teaching meeting, with a nice wiggly pink line in between the two destinations. Having skipped happily five minutes down the road, I was just standing in the vague area of where I thought the meeting could be when a gentleman tapped me on the shoulder.
"Can I help you?" he said.
"Thankyou, domo, arigato gozaimas," I answered, bowing three times, because I still haven't worked out when to respond in English and when to respond in Japanese, so I do both in case I get it wrong and it's rude.
He took my map from me very earnestly, and then led me in total silence back across the road. Six or seven minutes later - having asked a number of strangers the directions in Japanese - he brought me promptly back outside my hotel.
"Here you are," he said, and - looking at the pavement - sped off across the road again, leaving me touched and pink and giggling slightly to hide in the reception area for another ten minutes until I could creep out again without upsetting him. He'd been so keen to help me, that he hadn't realised he was taking me back to where I had started from.

This isn't my resting place, unfortunately; it's a good seven hours bus trip from Fukuoka to my new home, in the south of Miyazaki. But if the welcome here is anything like the one I can expect when I get to Nichinan, I think I'm going to fit in very nicely indeed. Even if I spend most of my time being sent in totally the wrong direction.