October 4 – Hakodate, Japan

good morning Hakodate

Hakodate squids

Weather – 18º, drizzle and fog

Steps –10,879

13 hours 26 min of daylight

Latitude – Calgary 51º, Hakodate 42º

Hakodate a small city (pop 300,000) is on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido and is where we spent the day. Hokkaido’s largest city is Sapporo (of Sapporo beer fame).

our cablecar

The distance between Hakodate (today) and Aomori (yesterday) is about 119Km and would take 1 hour by train and 4 hours by car which would include a ferry. However, it took us about

ship in the distance

14 hours to sail. We sailed in circles through the night. I’m not sure why we do this when sailing from one close port to another, but we’ve done this plenty of times. It must have to do with how long we can stay in port, or how much $$$ is costs to stay longer.

Today’s tour started with a sort of guided walk through Motomachi – I say sort of because despite Ike's (our guide) best efforts, he was very hard to understand. This is life when travelling in a non-English speaking country. I’d have liked to have learned more, but no big deal.

former city hall, rebuilt post fire

Motomachi is a charming area with cobblestone streets at the foot of mount Hakodate, where most foreigners lived after Japan opened to the west in 1854. Prior to then, Japan had an isolation

random street adornment

policy where relations and trade with other countries were relatively non-existent. When the west was allowed in buildings representing western culture popped up.

We saw buildings here foreign to Japanese culture – Russian Orthodox, Catholic, Episcopal churches, former British embassy. Everywhere we look is also very lush…I guess that’s what happens when it

melonpan machine

rains A LOT. Motomachi is also very hilly at the base of the mountain. I’m not sure how some of the tour participants felt about that, but it was very clear that it’d be hilly.

anticipating the delicious

The most interesting part of our visit to Motomachi was trying a melonpan. Melonpan (メロンパン), is a Japanese sweetbun with a crispy crust. The outside resembles a melon,  hence the name. They don’t taste like melon. The one I got was sliced in half and filled with ice-cream. This was a super interesting experience. The shop was a small, covered counter area with a machine that takes your order. When we walked up to the machine it was all in Japanese but had a

Chris always the helper

button to switch to English. There were pictures and lots of instructions. The instructions were even spoken out loud. Then a ticket was spit out which you take to the guy at the window who then makes

getting soupy

your sweet treat! The bun came directly out of an oven and steamed when he sliced it open. He then filled it with ice cream. It was delicious. Kind of like a cream-puff. It was kinda intimidating at first, but then when we got it Chris helped the next couple.

We also hunted for and found the Hakodate’s famed man-hole covers with squid on them. Hakodate’s city mascot is a squid. Because of Hakodate’s history of being a squid fishing port there is evidence of squid everywhere.

We bought a squid croquette (basically a deep fried squid cake) at the top of the cable car which was delicious. We could have eaten about 10 more, they were so good.

The cable car to the top of Mount Hakodate was a bit of a bust because of the

snack

quite a view

super thick fog. The view from the observation deck was zip, zilch, nada…nothing! Although, of course it would have been better to have been able to see something, it was actually cool to see nothing.

We washed down the squid croquette with a beer and a blueberry milk sour – a sweet, fruity 3%ABV drink, pretty good.

Our last stop was at the Hakodate Morning Market. I looooooove a market. It would be a tough decision to make if I had to choose between a market, a museum and seeing animals. Those have got to be my top 3 favourite things to

google trans

see on vacation.

me in the tram

The market takes up about four city blocks and is exactly what you’d hope for in a Japanese market – tons and TONS of fish, a TON of crab, but lots of squid, huge scallops, salmon and salmon roe, shellfish that look like small conch and other things I didn’t even recognize. Basically, ENDLESS SEAFOOD! Oh, and a HUGE octopus. Unfortunately, Ike didn’t give us as much info as I’d have hoped, but it was cool to just LOOK at everything. At one point Ike did stop by a squid place and showed us we could get a small, but delicious strip of I’m sure was the freshest squid I’ve ever eaten.

can see some coming down

Ike said sayonara to us and we were on our own. Once again. we had to be brave and order lunch. One great thing in Japanese eating places is that there are pictures for everything you could order, so all we do is point to the picture. We get soba noodles with 2 tempura shrimp, squid filled with rice and 2 Sapporo beers – about 30CAD. This was a food court kinda situation in the middle of the market.

We also see the pricy cantaloupe melons. We learned that in Japan people bring cantaloupe as a host gift when visiting. The melons are pricy because they are

BUGS!

wrapped and packaged beautifully.

zoom to read

One other fascinating thing we saw was a vending machine, not just any vending machine. In Japan, vending machines are everywhere, but mostly have the same drinks in them. Like they are all sponsored by the same drink company. Well…the one different one we saw today was filled with BUGS!!! Yes, bugs…to eat! I would have loved to have learned more about THAT! And probably would have tried, but would never commit to a whole purchase without anyone guiding me!

We were back at the ship a short 4

pricy melons

lunch

hours after we left but had an amazing morning!!!