South Korea & Japan Winter Trip 2007 - Day 14

26/12 Hirosaki, Morioka (盛岡), Morioka Park, Aeon Jusco Department Store

We got up early and have the free breakfast in the hotel.

This is the dining room of the hotel!

The best thing here is you can drink whatever you want in this automatic drinking machine!!!  It's really good, you can drink as much as you can during the breakfast period!!

The service in this is pretty good and cheap!!!  You can enjoy free internet services and cheap laundry services!

After the breakfast, we had a brief look around the supermarket of this city to buy some apple made cookies and pie as souvenir...  Actually, there is nothing much to see in this city, so we decided to take a bus to Morioka in the morning!

On the way of our bus tour to Morioka.  Do you think they're like Christmas trees?

The farm was covered by snow!!

Although JR is a very convenient public transport in Japan, the bus is also very great that with cheaper price.  So if you have limited budget, you can always search for bus as an alternative.  They run in a very precious schedule and there is a display digital board to indicate the stop in both English and Japanese.  So you won't miss your stop!!!  Don't forget, most drivers are very nice, so you can always ask them, if they don't understand English, you can just give the written Japanese to them, they will have some exaggerated body language to reply you! 

After 2 hours of traveling by bus we arrived Morioka!! Morioka is the city is the city of the Iwate Province that is located at the South East of Aomori!.

Here we arrived our hotel with the Japanese sleeping dressing provided!! Nice!!

This was the first time in our trip to sleep in the tatami though we've been slept in the floor of Ben and Corey in Hakodate and Seoul as well as in the skiing family house at Niseko!! 

This hotel is OK, very cheap and close to the JR station, but he room without shower, so we have to share the bathroom with the whole floor of people.  Luckily, nobody living in our floor so we could use the whole bathroom and knock the door!!  High privacy!!!  They've a small hot pot there as well!!! 

You've to take off your shoes in the hotel lobby, so this hotel is very clean but the girl in the help desk couldn't speak any English!

After settle down, we went out to explore this city and found that similar to other cities in Japan, Morioka is a very small city!!!   The tourist information center in Japan is very useful, you can find a young girl who can speak English to give you some free map of the city.  You can also ask her to recommend some good restaurant and dishes if you wish!!  Yes, our trip is food orientated, so we always ask the staff to circle down some district where have loads of restaurants!

This is the old Iwate Bank building!!

I experienced good and bad experiences here.  We tried to find the restaurant that the girl in information centre introduced to us, so we stopped a Japanese woman to ask and she said that restaurant wasn't very good and recommended us to another local and cheap one.  She was very nice to bring us to the front door of the restaurant, but then we found that we did just pass through this restaurant in the very first beginning!!!

The worst thing was my first accident occurred here..  It's actually very strange that I fell down on the street with no reason!!!  As you can see, there was no snow here, it wasn't smooth at all but I still fell down!!!  It's unbelievable that I could handle all snow area but not here!!!  A Japanese old woman saw me and she was so nice to ask me "Are you OK?" in Japanese...it's so embarrassing indeed and Alban was walking too fast with the Japanese woman who brought us to the restaurant!!!

So we arrived this local restaurant where you can see out the people prepare the food.

All the menu is in Japanese without any picture and a single Chinese character...We're really in trouble now!

There was a Japanese girls looking at us and she was very nice to explain the menu to us.  She suggested Michelle & me ordered the small mixed noodle and Alban ordered the medium one.  She was nice to help us to order too!!

So this is the small mixed noodle(炸醬麵), it's quite big even it's a small size.

We faced another problem when the noodle arrive.  How should we eat it??  The nice Japanese lady taught us how to add the sauces to the noodle.  The first step is very normal, you just eat the noodle with sauces, no special stirring is required.

Guess what the egg for???  You have to finish all the noodle first then, you can give the pate to the boss, they'll help you to add the egg and some hot soup then you can start stirring...that's the spirit of mixed noodle!!

It looked quite disgusting, but it tasted actually good, much better than the noodles!!!

The Japanese girl asked us how come we would visit Morioka as there was not many tourists in this city!!!   That's actually the reason why I come here, I hate going to the city full with tourists!

I saw this kind of temple in some Japanese ghost movies!!

Motioka Park.....hahha..we've been many parks in this trip now!!!  We saw some uncles do some training here, it's very weird!!

wow..we could see some flowers here on trees!!  I can imagine how the park look like in the bloomsome season!!!

Nice river, this park is actually very beautiful!!

We decided to see the sunset here~~

We saw an old man and 2 young girls in the park.  The girls were making different cute post and the old man took the photos for them.  I don't know why, I felt that old man wasn't a good man, he should be a lustful man....sorry for my subjective!!

After seeing how the girls did their posts, Michelle & me imitated them to make some cute posts...

It's a heart...yes..the Japanese girls did it just before!!!

actually, it's all silly~~~~perhaps we're too old to do so!!

Alban took me this picture when I was looking somewhere...

And he felt that was cool and asked me to take a picture for him!!!

At last, we set a timer and took a picture for we 3~It's actually quite cold that was kind of out of our expectation.  Alban was too cold as his jacket was getting dirty due to his naught jump to the soil, so that I lent my gloves to him for a while!

OK..after a sequence of silly pictures taking, the sun was ready to go down..

nice sunset~~~

Crows in Japan are very terrible...It's just too many....watch this video, and you can feel it!!  How come there are many crows in Japan?? 

We did some souvenir shopping then, bought one to Ricky as he lent me 2 traveling book for our trip!!

We tried different types of pancake cookies in this shop, if we didn't buy anything, that was very bad...so we bought it back to HK as souvenir

This bicycle was too old!!

After the window shopping we wanted to go to a AEON JUSCO Department store to see an exhibition.  We passed by this department at bus on our way from Hirosaki to Morioka but we didn't know the exact location.  We asked many Japanese and they're all so nice and willing to answer our question.   Although we didn't speak Japanese, we used our body language.   As the Aeon is located in left and the Jusco is in the right, so I put up my left hand and said "Aeon" and my right hand for "Jusco", the Japanese could understand us!!!

Finally we took a bus to there, all Japanese looked at us in a strange way.  Perhaps, not many travelers come to this city!!  We held the poster of the exhibition and we asked a passenger to remind us to take off when it arrived, but in somehow it's like everyone know where we are going.  We're very silly that wanna take off in wrong stations for twice and all passengers were so hardworking to stop us!!!hahah...so funny!!!!  And we read that we could get a discount coupon on bus, we were trying to ask the bus driver, but a kid just gave the coupons to us before we tried to ask!!!  Woo..they're so nice and smart!!!

This is the exhibition, but it's bad the exhibition was closed  when we arrived!!

I tried to open the door at the back and take a fast look of the small figures!!!  The staff found us to take a picture and asked who were we...so we left it quickly!

This departmental is quite big, so it's not bad for us to visit here!!

Toys shop...and the shit on Alban's head...he didn't know what was it on his head when I put it up for that picture...

Wow...we saw some stars here...broadcasting...

We met a cute kid here too, he always looked at me and then I looked back him, he was so shy to hide from his mom...very funny!!!  We're like very special in this city!!

WOW.......very big melon!!

We had a BBQ dinner here and we met the first handsome Japanese waiter here!!

The cold noodle but still not as good as the one we tried in Hakodate!!

We spent the whole night here until the department store closed.   As some exits was blocked already, the security guards led us back to the bus station!!

What a wonderful day in Morioka!!