Yooooooosh!

just got back from a long, exhausting trip, walking all over sapporo and hakodate on the island of hokkaido, and aomori city on honshu with a couple students. our guide in sapporo was another student home for the spring break.

our first night was spent in hakodate, a port town on the southern edge of hokkaido. the harbor in hakodate is lined with old 19th century, western style warehouses and little canals leading up to the loading dock areas of all the buildings, which have been converted to shops and restaurants. we wandered around and ate at a ramen place, then headed up the side of a mountain out on the edge of the city by way of a ropeway gondola. up there, we had a misty view and a whole bunch of wind, so we rode the creepy, swaying gondola back down the mountainside and went to bed, stopping for some sushi on the way.

the next morning, we got up really early to eat at a few blocks of shops and a covered market area selling really fresh, really pungent seafood (the whole place smelled like a big wet fish), and then rode one of hakodate's streetcars out to the grounds of a 5-point star shaped former fortress from the mid 19th century, i think it was the site of the last standoff between meiji forces and the old shogunate. there's absolutely nothing left of any of the buildings, just the moat area and the space inside it, which is now a public park lined with cherry trees which haven't blossomed yet. there's a tower next to the park, so we rode the elevator up and got a good view of the city and the entire fortress area, then ate lunch at an extremely wierd restaurand which combined circus and 16th century european religious imagery, served burgers, and played '50's american music.

raced for the train, made it just in time, and rode all the way up to sapporo on the other side of the island. up there, we met naho, the student who lives up there, and went out to an old area just outside the city with a long street of old western style warehouses that sold food and produced glassware, jewelry, and music boxes. we had some oysters, giant kamaboko (fish cake) rolls, sushi, and ice cream, and wandered along another harbor area with old warehouses and canals.

that night was our first of two staying in the house of the sister of kitaichi-san, a really friendly, goofy old guy that works in the resident hall office. his sister lives in a suburb of sapporo with her husband and her brother. i was scared shitless i'd say or do something wrong or screw up the bath taking or breakfast customs, but they seemed to like me and kept giving us food and presents the whole time. the second night we were there, they took us out to dinner and fed us two gigantic plates of the best sashimi i've ever eaten, with lobster, shrimp, oysters, salmon, and two kinds of nabe, a japanese hot-pot. the husband told me to "be careful with my big body", and the wife and he refered to eachother as "mother" and "father". i don't really know how to describe something that fulfilling, something i wanted to have the chance to do for so long. they were so warm and enthusiastic the whole time, they made me feel as comfortable as i could possibly have felt.

on our second day in sapporo with naho, we walked all over the city checking out some of the old western style buildings that are still standing, an old kendo school with a clock tower, some kind of city hall building, a few buildings on the campus of hokkaido university, and an old sapporo beer brewery which now has some old restaurants in it. we ate at a mongolian barbecue, stuffing ourselves with little grilled chunks of meat and vegetables, walked through some more shops in the warehouse, then headed back to kitaichi-san's sister's house.

the next morning we got on a train for aomori, back on honshu. aomori's another harbor city with a huge, two-towered cable bridge and a whole bunch of famous apple orchards in the surrounding area. we went out to the site of aomori's main matsuri, somewhere in the woods, and walked around for a while next to a creek, then came back to the area around our hotel for some walking along the harbor and dinner. on day two in aomori, we went to the excavated site of a settlement from the jomon period, people that lived there 5,ooo years ago. there were some reconstructed huts, one of which was a huge hall where the whole community lived in the winter to keep warm, some burial mounds, and a pit where they threw animal bones and miscellaneous garbage. we also saw some of their tools, pottery and jewelry. alot of it was very similar to early native american homes, tools, and designs. it's amazing to me that people who lived thousands of miles away from eachother would arrive at such closely related concepts of design and useage at around the same point in time.

after the jomon huts, we went out to an area called hirosaki, filled with old shrines and temples. we walked along a road of nothing but shrine after shrine for a few miles until we came to an orchard with a playground area and visitor center. we talked to a woman working out in one of the fields, and she gave us apples and a big jar of pure apple cider. after the orchard, we went to the site of hirosaki castle, a big area of gardens, ponds, streams, bridges and the remains of the castle, a large tower on top of a hill overlooking the hirosaki area. we went to the downtown area of hirosaki for some dinner in some wierdly overpriced joint where the operators were also the house shamisen players, who played a song for us because we had to catch our train back to akita before their nightly show started. the shamisen has an amazing, kind of scary but beautiful drone and twang sound, and the song they played was pretty intense. they whacked the shamisens with huge picks, barked and shouted things and stared straight ahead, moving only their arms.

we got on our train, and rode for several hours back to akita, talking and eating one of the 6 or 7 bags of food kitaichi-san's sister and her husband gave us, got back to school, and then i sat around being groggy for a while, for some reason not wanting to go to bed. i felt like i was gone for a long, long time, and akita station really felt like home when we finally got there.

shwew! long post. now a lot of pictures.