I come to this country for many reasons and one of those reasons is to eat shokupan as often as possible. For this morning in Aomori City, I take us to a nice niche cafe. I get some fancy fancy shokupan – it is small but toasted to perfection. My drink some apple matcha thing because see previous posts about apples out the wazoo.
We end up serendipitously near the craft shop I want to visit. It has patterns and japanese cotton and prints for sale. On this trip, I really wanted to get myself a yukata pattern vs buying one at home, for cultural appropriation reasons.
The craft shop has loads of super fun prints – traditional and non – and I of course get some cat print fabric. I hope I have enough to make a long yukata. I’m about 30 cm short (if you only do freedom units, that’s 1.5 bananas). I can make this work.
From the craft store, we go through a little park to a pair of shrines. I like the small inner city shrines – they feel like sanctuaries nestled in between tall buildings and busy streets. Kane-ume-inari feels like a lil oasis, with its cute pine and stone garden behind a subshrine. It’s also got a lot of cute little golden inaris near the small main shrine.
Across the street is another shrine – Hirota shrine – and its thing is apples. It’s been here for a thousand friggin years. I’m sure its thing has been apples for a long while. Mostly I wanted another goshuin and I wanted to look at the apples in the purification fountain.
But a treat awaits, for it’s time for another water-changing omikuji! Yay! I foolishly think I will maybe get anything better than weird luck. I have seriously not had a string of mediocre luck like this on any trip. I tie the omikuji to rid myself of it. Maybe this portends warding off some menieres nonsense, I dunno.
We popped into the fish market right after the shrine since it’s supposed to be a good one – much less touristy than tsukiji in tokyo has become. It was early afternoon, so it was a lot quieter, with a few merchants packed up already.
After being fish lords, we check out the ferry memorial that’s near the station. It’s got the history of lots of ferries that were in service between the Japanese mainland and Hokkaido. The ferries saw a variety of uses over the years, and were also sunk like. A lot. Usually by typhoons or bad weather but sometimes because during WWII they carried fuel and that’s a good target to blow up. They have a lot of different dioramas that showcase Japanese life that was enabled by the ferries and the types of folks who rode it.
It was pretty cool to go through the engine room, hold, and the bridge. It was a delightful 50s teal color. All the phones are heavy plastic, the kind that could be a serious murder weapon (this is always the thing I think of).
We end the day with weird Japanese train station pasta because the family must experience this at least once. This one had a limited menu of pasta because it also seemed to have other japanese dishes, like doria and CORN PIZZA. But it was like 20 bucks for 4 of us to have a huge meal, and it wasn’t bad!
