Yay, Hakodate, my brother’s favourite town! Little did I know, but this was going to become my favourite town too, but for different reasons. First stop once we were off the super hokuto, was Lucky Pierrot.

Wow the interior of these places is like nothing I’d ever expected! And to think, these guys love Chinese fried chicken XD Since this was our first time, my brother ordered Set A for us since that was a good intro to the food here.

This was some iced tea. No sugar at all, which is interesting because I’m used to receiving cold sugary drinks at diners. But this is Japan, so it’s a plain iced tea!

A mug o’ chips!! Yeah!! Tasty chips with.. cheese sauce?

And this burger. Yeah that’s some nice fried chicken! Loads of flavour! This was such a good feed even though I’d eaten plenty on the train! Definitely a great spot to eat at and all the different shops have different decor!

The streets around where we were staying were fairly quiet, as we weren’t quite in the touristy area. Then, we caught the tram (they have trams here!!) to a place called Goryokaku. Little did I know that this was going to be the most amazing place ever.

Goryokaku is a fortress, and surrounded by water. What an interesting shape.

And here’s a plaque of someone? I don’t know who that is though. But there was a giant tour group of Chinese people and they were being explained who this was, and then all the tourists started touching the face. Omg why were they touching the face, who was this person ;_;

Oh. OH. When my brother said I’d get to see a place where Hijikata was mentioned, I didn’t realised just how famous he is around here…

So many statues of him!! Wow!! I mean, I knew he was a real person after getting obsessed with PeaceMaker Kurogane, but I didn’t realise just how prominent of a figure he was! Everyone loves Hijikata here! Goryokaku was his fortress (well, not “his” lol). There’s so much history here!

There are even cartoon versions of him. And he’s the official guide for Hakodate! Wow!!

You cannot believe how excited I was at all this. This trip was great, and Abashiri prison was pretty inspiring, and Noboribetsu was a really different experience, but Goryokaku. I don’t have words for this. There was something about seeing the “real” Hijikata that was actually, quite literally life changing. He’s not even my favourite “character”! That still belongs to Okita Souji, PMK version. But omg. I need to come back here to fully explore this fort, twice over ;_;

This place is truly amazing. I absolutely have to come back and explore ALL OF IT.

I also found a sakura anmitsu that I totally had to have. The jelly was not the standard dense agar agar texture, and I liked this better! Plus they had the tri-colour dango, which actually reminded me a lot of the one that Okita was eating in one of the episodes of PMK. I’m so obsessed!

Ok. That night everyone really wanted crab, so we went to a restaurant that had several live crab tanks. My brother found it amusing that someone had left a very poor review somewhere about this place, but I got a good vibe from it, so we went in. We opted for a snow crab and a king crab, and my dad went and chose the (un)lucky crustacea that would become our dinner!

We had half sashimi and half boiled for each one. Look at the way the flesh is structured, it almost looks like grapes off a vine! I dunno that’s just the way I saw it. Both species of crab were super delicious, but the snow crab is sweeter!

Oh, here are my camera pics.

After a very satisfying dinner, some night photography!

And a yubari melon! Yeah! I’ve wanted one for a long time. It wasn’t quite the right season for it though and it wasn’t quite ripe, but it was so fragrant! Yubari melons are quite next level compared to the standard Hokkaido melon. It’s worth forking out the premium for these ones!

The next morning, it was off to the Hakodate morning markets!

This stall was a place where you can fish your own live squid out of a kiddy pool, and then it gets prepared right in front of you!

Yeah our squid time!!! I took a video of this but our squid kind of just flopped over instead of doing a proper dance hahaha. Plus, I’m not actually the biggest fan of raw squid, but this was worth getting once to see how it all works!

This was the real good stuff, a super tasty seafood bowl! Yeah! I’m totally getting this again the next time I come back!

Also, gorging on yubari melons :D

Hakodate love their squid!! I want to come back for their squid festival and learn the ika odori!

Now it was time to catch the super hokuto, with a Snaffles in hand!

Hello Onuma quasi-national park!

It started to rain as we searched for lunch. There was a cutesey little hot dog shop, but they also sold soba. Not just any soba either. There was a mountain vegetable soba, but what I noticed was the junsai soba. YES JUNSAI SOBA. Omg. I love junsai. So I ordered this for the gooey water plant goodness! I love junsai!

A Goryokaku manhole cover, cool!

Back to the main part of Hakodate. Hahaha a love themed Lucky Pierrot!

I got myself a Snaffle’s strawberry shortcake! Yeah!

Haha you can even get a Shinsengumi outfit photo here! Man I’d love to get the entire outfit. The haori itself was something I contemplated getting, but I felt I was unworthy at the time and wouldn’t even wear it. So much samurai stuff here, it was amazing!

For the afternoon and evening, it was a trip up to Mount Hakodate.

Look at those clouds. I actually really enjoyed seeing the clouds from up here, because the sunrays were amazing!

Haha look a Shinsengumi collectible dispensing machine! Oh man I really wanted to get the haori and the flag ones, and maybe the Hijikata ones. It took a while for me to understand that this required 2x 100 yen coins; I couldn’t figure out why 1 wasn’t making it turn lol. And my first one was the green one!! I don’t even know who that was ;_; So I rolled again, and got my flag version, yay! I’m getting so many Shinsengumi souvenirs here hahah.

Hakodate at night!

One the sun had set, we headed back down as quickly as possible – the cable car was shutting down early because there was going to be a lightning storm at night! We headed over to a beer house, which had a really delicious house beer!

Some wagyu nigiri!

I also had to get pickles because I love pickles. There’s even pickled burdock! Yeah!

Steak, which was quite tasty!

If I remember, this was the “Genghis Khan”. Glad we got to try this! This place had really nice food! And that was it for that night.

Our final day in Hakodate, and the family stayed in for a bit, so I took a walk to the nearby shrine, and then over to the morning markets to see if I could find that sushi shop I spotted the other day.

Huzzah! I managed to find the sushi place and I placed my order in Japanese! Well, everything except for surf clam. I am really bad at knowing the mollusc names in Japanese, though my fish ordering abilities are adequate for common things I want to eat. I got my tamago, my akami maguro, otoro, surf clam, hotate, botan ebi, and uni! Woohoo!

A live squid transport!

This was a really cool alleyway. I’d love to explore it since it seems like there might be shops in here!

A pit stop at Lucky Pierrot where my brother stocked up on heaps of goods here to take back to Tokyo, while I tried out the soft serve.

My mum saw these massive squid cookie things (I have no idea what to call them… battered flattened squid???) and wanted one, so I ordered one for her. It’s “fun” to hear the screaming squid as they get flatted in the squisher box thing XD. It’s pretty tasty too!

My lovely gold foil bento for the shinkansen back to Tokyo. I love the bentos here!

And a taste of sea pineapple. It’s not very yummy XD. My brother spotted this on the food carts that are on this train! I guess that’s one more animal to add to my list of things eaten :D Not that I have a list lol.

Goodbye Hakodate, goodbye Hokkaido. You were actually more amazing than I imagined. I’ll have to come back for Goryokaku for sure, and the quasi national park, and maybe even Noboribetsu! Hijikata-san you are amazing!!!