Day 28: Mochi and Soba Making (Also the 4th of July!)

Breakfast:

4th of July hair bow!:

Some of the trams here are really cute:

In class today we made more tanabata papers. This one says the same thing as the last one I made:

The weather was really great today, and we took group HIF pictures outside:

Onigiri #18:

More milky sweet coffee:

I ate lunch on the steps outside because the weather was so nice and had a pack of three different half sandwiches, an orange flavored fiber drink, and jelly coffee from 7-11.

Me:

My friend took this picture and sent it to me later:

We had to take a bus to get to the restaurant where we were going to do the mochi and soba making. Inside Hakodate Station there was a display set up with lots of little origami squid:

The set up for mochi:

The people who worked at the restaurant made the mochi while we mostly just watched, but we did get to help pound the mochi with a big hammer. Mochi is a sticky paste made from rice. They rolled our mochi in a red bean paste and in a soy bean powder which was actually really yummy.

Mochi:

More mochi:

Me pounding the mochi:

Every time you swung the hammer it would get stuck in the super sticky mochi and was really difficult to lift back out.
More mochi:

After that, they made soba:

Soba is a long buckwheat noodle.

It was really impressive how the cooks kneaded the thick dough:

He then rolled out the dough so it was really thin, folded it up, and began cutting the noodles:

I didn't mean to take this picture, but here are the skirts Tegan and I got at Uniqlo the other day:

They let us try cutting the noodles too! It was really difficult, and you can definitely see where his noodles stopped and ours began.

Fuji-san!

Me:

Saito-san!

The finished soba noodles:

Afterwards we got to eat the noodles for dinner!:

You are supposed to pick up the noodles and dip them in the liquid before eating them, but I screwed up and poured some of the liquid onto the noodles. This wouldn't have been a problem if the noodles had been sitting in a normal dish, but they were sitting on a sheet of little wooden strips so the liquid went right through and onto the table.

Here is the cute phone charm I got on the mountain yesterday:

It's a marimo!

Also, I got these Pokey at Hakodate Station today and think they're hilarious. They're bitter, dark chocolate.