City of Lights
Sister’s picture compilation.
I have never heard of Hakodate in my entire life.
But now I have, and I would love to visit it again one day. 
So sister and I continued our way up from Hachinohe to Hakodate, our halfway stop to Sapporo.
We sat in the roomy reserved section of the shinkansen while hundreds of people squeezed unglamorously in the public section. *evil snicker*
This was the #82764 photo taken because I couldn’t aim the cammie in the right angle. What to do, it is not often I do this kinda thing!
When we got to Hakodate, it was dark. Story of our lives. Nice Day Inn (9-11 Otemachi, from the west exit of Hakodate station) wasn’t easy to locate, and we had to enlist the help of a Japanese couple who was holidaying and spoke good English to find out where Otemachi, “opposite Hotel Kokusei”, was. When we finally slid open the door to the house, there was no one around. We chose a room then dumped our bags on the floor. Looking at the bunk beds with the futons and blankets piled on top, we haphazardly threw layers upon layers, thinking it didn’t matter as we were only staying a night. Well, it did matter when we finally met Saito-san, the mistress of the inn.
“Later, I will make your beds for you,” she stated after showing us the map of Hakodate. Upon hearing that we had already made the beds, she threw us a narrowed-eyed look with a wry smile and picked up a small notice on the desk that printed clearly “I will arrange your beds for you.” We could only give her sheepish grins as apology.
- sister
Nice Day Inn.
Between the main door and the inn. It looks like some creepy ghosty house, but I love the ’smell’ of the place almost immediately - old-school, musty but clean.
Small and cosy. There were only 5 rooms in the inn, thank goodness we managed to secure a room, else we would have been stranded with nowhere to stay!
I had an -__-” experience in my stay at the inn. It was when I was getting all ready to shower and the bathroom door [there was an opaque plastic almost covering the surrounding of bathroom door half a metre away, but provided no respite actually because the keyword here is 'almost' and not 'totally'] refused to close properly. I was just gonna give it one last jam when someone unexpectedly stepped into the inn, announcing something in Japanese [maybe "Tadaima", I don't know I was too shocked at that time]. Yikes!! We stared at each other through the bl**dy almost-but-not-totally-covering-the-bathroom-door plastic for a split second - me in abject horror, and him in surprise, and I slammed the bathroom door with a bang. He saw almost all of me!! iShy!!!
After the very traumatising incident, sister and I escaped the inn to explore Hakodate. We promised each other that we would control our spendings in Hakodate as we still had 3 more stops to go to. Needless to say, that didn’t work. Determined to find an eating place selling salmon sashimi [and not just those big round squishy yeurgh-looking orange eggs thingie that was being sold everywhere], we set off for our quest only to get waytooeasily side-tracked by this shop.
Big brown bear bears!
The shop owner helped us to take this shot when he saw us camwhoring individually. Ahem. His shop has a mish-mash of stuff, and we speculated that he made most of the wood figurines himself. Nice!
We saw this everywhere, what a quaint city! *loves*
Finally, my elusive salmon sashimi!
After deliberating outside different shops for eons, one restaurant owner decided to step out to welcome us in. Oops. Using wild gestures and sign language [sister and I found ourselves automatically using sign language to facilitate understanding which didn't work of course since Japanese SL is different from the SL we use in Singapore] and limited Japanese, the people understood, after 15 minutes, about my want of salmon sashimi and brought sister and I to the back of the restaurant as of the picture above. Warm cosy little place, ’tis a family business methink.
Sister and I were looking forward to visiting Mount Hakodate to see the spectacular nightview of Hakodate but alas, the ropeway was already closed. *crestfallen* So we headed back to Nice Day Inn for an early night. Saito-san has already made our beds for us. ^.^
The view we missed. Taken from a webby.
Our beds, and then some.
Nice Day Inn on the outside.
A nice cooling morning greeted us the next day. Hakodate looked so different in the day!
Yet another morning market. -_-”
I coined Hakodate as ‘Melontown’, a sister of Appletown-that-is-Hachinohe due to the variety of melon products available. Sister half-happily half-worriedly [because she has no more space in her bag and her bag weighed like, 10 tonnes] stocked up on her collection of HiChews and KitKats the flavours which cannot be found in Singapore. Naturally, there were melon KitKats, which were really yummy. I want more of those!
Sister and her flaming red hair and Mt Hakodate.
We were heading back to Nice Day Inn to get our bags for the journey to Sapporo, all the while looking longingly at Mt Hakodate in the near distance. “Let’s take some shots with the mountain,” I suggested.
We ended up going closer and closer and closer to the mountain [and thus increasingly further away from the inn and the train station] before we realised uh oh, we’re gonna be late, again!
With Saito-san accompanying us as far as the morning market, sister and I made our way to the station, with regrets of not being able to spend more time at this wonderful place, Hakodate.
- the lost traveller
s t a r m | s t March 14th, 2008
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