Day 21: Lucky Pierrot and the Warehouse District

Breakfast:

Apparently my tram stop is one meter above sea level:

 Map of the trams in Hakodate and the attractions near each stop:

 The weather was really great today!:

 I got this coffee during break, it was tangy:

For lunch I was going to go to Lucky Pierrot with a friend for lunch, but we ended up not being able to find each other after class, so I decided to just go by myself. Lucky Pierrot is a chain restaurant that is all over Hakodate, but only in Hakodate, so it's sort of a tourist attraction. It is also delicious. I got chicken katsu and a Lucky Garana drink which tasted like a sweeter, milder, Coca-Cola with bubblegum flavoring. I really liked the Hakodate-themed picture on the can.

After that, I walked around the warehouse district for a while and got some souvenirs. There are a bunch of brick buildings lined up with all sorts of shops inside from small souvenir shops to larger drug stores. I was mainly looking for more of those detailed Hello Kitty charms and finally found some after about an hour of searching. I also got these hair things and a ramen flavored chocolate bar:

Here are some of the phone charms in one of the souvenir shops:

I didn't get this phone decoration, but I took a picture of it because I got the same one when I came to Japan in high school, but it broke a year ago:

Also, cannabis scented incense: for all those times you wanted to smell like weed without actually smoking it.

The warehouse district is right on the water, and the sunny weather made the area really lovely:

 (Note: That is the island where the Yubusame event was held^)

I went into a music box shop which was really cool and reminded me of Leavenworth.

I really liked this one. Totoro was one of my favorite movies as a little kid, so it was cute and nostalgic:

There was a really big music box there called an interchangeable cylinder music box which was made in Switzerland in 1890. When I asked one of the women working there if I could take a picture of it, she was really nice and offered to show me it playing:

Before watching and hearing it play, I thought it was like an ordinary music box. The bells, drums, and wood block were pretty awesome additions.

There were also some really cool wooden ones that moved on their own after being wound up. This display had a few of them running electrically:

Because the weather was so nice and because I was already halfway there, I decided to walk to city hall instead of taking the tram. Along the way I ran into my old friend, the building that I thought was my hotel but wasn't:

It's really awesome to me how much the old, the new, the industrial, and the natural all seem to come together in this city (and in most of Japan for that matter):

I had never consciously considered how awful it must be to write in kanji with spray paint:

(It says to be cautious of snow slides)

I went to café akira again, and got a kind of overpriced glass of "Hakodate Milk" because I didn't really want coffee, but also wanted to sit in a semi-private spot with wifi. It was pretty great milk though.

For dinner we had shrimp sashimi. I stuck to the shrimp on the right that had been de-shelled because I just couldn't bring myself to eat the whole ones. My host mom definitely preferred the whole ones though and would break them in half, then suck the insides out of both parts.

We had the dango I brought back with ice cream for dessert. Again, ice cream with dango is ridiculously good.