Baby seals, squids, yams

Saturday was an incredible day for conversing with Japanese people. I started off the morning wandering through the fish market. My group included Nao, whose oral Japanese far surpassed anyone in the group, but pretty soon I was holding my own chatting it up and getting samples from fishmongers. Cool discovery of the morning: いかすみのアイスクリム、squid ink flavored ice cream.

Also note Chris' shirt: 日本語勉強中(in the middle of studying Japanese). This was the best conversation starter with all the natives who chuckled at us.

By the way, my squiddy friends of the marching band, I'm taking photos of every cool squid-related thing I find. And because Hakodate is the squid capital of the world, there will soon be a gallery of epic proportions.

In an attempt to find the young person's night life of Hakodate, my friends goaded me into chatting it up with attractive young Japanese girls. I was told afterwards that apparently I kind of intimidated them with what has suddenly become my "exotic" look of blue eyes, blonde hair, and manly ways. It's equally likely that they were timid about dealing with clumsy, badly spoken foreigners, but as the first explanation is far more flattering to my ego that's the one I choose to believe.

But in exploring the historical district further, we were invited into a Buddhist temple's service. I couldn't begin to explain anything of what was going on (I think the service was performed in classical chinese? At least the prayerbook we saw was written that way), but it was pretty.



With a group, I scaled Hakodate Yama again in spite of the impenetrable fog. It was a longer route and slower going than my previous run, but the fog gave the whole place this mystical quality. At the souvenir shop up top (not open on when I visited in the early morning) I ate caramels on the top of Hakodate Yama that had been flavored as cheesecake, corn, beer, and potato. Corn was the definite winner, being nigh identical to corn pops in candy form. Also tried ICE CREAM INSIDE OF WAFFLES. And then I found candies with baby seals, and resisted the urge to club them. After writing an enormous term paper last semester on how the sealing industry was a precursor to the struggles of territorial control and suzerainties between the US and Japan, any reference to seals in Japan has become even cooler to me than seal references in general. Dorky, I know.

Fog!
Caramel ice cream inside of waffle in a box. Brilliant.
And baby seals, urging me to buy "stick pie"

But then we went to a soba shop that was built into this sweet old couple's house- Ishizawa san and his wife are basically the coolest old people ever. I kept on asking about how the noodles were made in an attempt to stir up conversation (we were the only patrons in a small, homey room) and pretty soon they told us their life history. Even though much of the conversation was taken over by a more linguistically skilled friend and I couldn't track when they both started telling stories at the same time, it was great to make friends out of the blue like that. They even brought us special desserts, made from congealed cooking water produced in the Soba making.

Afterwards, we checked out a traditional bar style alley, with tiny shops (no more than 6 seats or so) stacked on top of each other. I got to talking again with Hi-chan and Maa-kun, my new favorite sassy bartending duo, and after I mentioned I had just turned 20 they brought me a special birthday pudding. How did they know how much I love pudding? Then one of the other patrons there brought our group some sweets made from yams. I frickin' love yams. This day was amazing for how many people I connected with through speaking Japanese, but I suddenly realize the sever lack of small gifts for giving to new friends now that I see how many I've received just by being friendly.

Also from the top of the mountain- a shrine written in classical chinese (we found an old school kanji to write "20" as 廿)