South Korea & Japan Winter Trip 2007 - Day 13 ~ 25/12 Apple city-Hirosaki (弘前), Hirosaki Castle

South Korea & Japan Winter Trip 2007 - Day 13

25/12 Apple city-Hirosaki (弘前), Hirosaki Castle

We got a train to Hirosaki today in afternoon.  Hirosaki is in Aomori, that meant our trip in Hokkaido was come to the end today!!

Here were our beds at Ben's apartment
 

Yes, we slept on the floor of his living room, there was no any free space after we laid on the floor...

Thanks for Ben, and we continued our holiday..

This building is close to Ben's apartment that is one of the famous landmark for us to identify his home.  As told by Ben, this church like building was not a church but a hotel!!  It's crazy that they had this weird ideas to turn a church into a hotel.

We passed by the restaurant that we came there for our first lunch.

This is the famous departmental store next to the tram station.

So we took another cute tram to the JR station.

we bought our tickets to Hirosaki.  It's in fact very expensive!!!  That was the most expensive tickets in out trip it's 5120 yen as we had taken 2 high speed tram to Hirosaki!

This is our fist JR!

The train is very clean and comfortable.

As Aomori and Hokkaido are separated by a sea, you can also take boat to there which will take around a night.  However, the time schedule wasn't very good, so we decided to take JR even it's more expensive.

Originally, there was a Doraemon tunnel, however, it's under maintenance when we visited...it's very bad!!

However, this sea view was actually very great!!!

Blue sky and sea....

Michelle was so concentrate in watching the view..

So do I~~~~

Alban was pretending to be cool again!!

The second JR
 

So here we arrived Hirosaki!!!

Welcome to Hirosaki!!!

Hirosaki JR Station!!!

Hirosaki is one of the big towns in Aomori (青森), the most famous thing in Aomori is apple!!  So you can see a big apple on the top of the post box

The apple shop

You see, there were many red and green apples they're all so big and cute!

As Michelle is a nurse, so wherever I travel with her, she will ask me to take a picture of the hospital.

Every shop closes very early in Japan, but the McDonald is like HK that will open for 24 hours.

This logo was found in the balustrade of the road when we're ready to cross. wow...so cute!! I love this apple city!

Finally we arrived our hotel, it's called Super hotel, a budget but very high quality hotel like in Otaru. This is our beds!

We even had a sofa!!

The view from my hotel, we slept at the topmost floor, so we got a quite good view!!

A very typical LCD TV in Japan's hotel. We though it's a computer when we first saw it!

There is TV tower in every city of Japan!

We went to the famous tourist sport - Hirosaki Castle

I've no idea what we're chatting at the gate of the castle!

The road to the park, and you see it's empty!

The trees here are very beautiful!!

So Japanese bridge with a frozen river!

As we saw the ice on the surface was so thin, so we tried to throw some hard object to the surface of the river, but the ice didn't melt! so strange!!

Alban recognized  the Japanese character - turtle from the Dragon Ball and he imitated the character of the cartoon! Silly man

So Japanese house..

I had no idea about what these houses used for..

This tree is strange but huge!!
There are

I heard that this castle was similar to the one in Kyoto, so I had quite a big expectation to it.  This is also the reason why I stopped here to see the castle.  When we saw this tower from far away, we thought it shouldn't be the castle, so we searched around but still nothing could be found.  Finally, we realized that most part of the castle had been demolished and this tower was the only building remained...

It's kind of small and disappointed, but still, we came here...so at least we gotta take some pictures back.

Self taking~~

If we came in some flowers season, I guess it'd look much better!

One more shot....

 I found in internet that attracted me to come here~~so I think we came here in a wrong time.

The sunset in Hirosaki !!!

So after visiting the Hirosaki Castle, we did some random window shopping around the city.

It seems that the wood in here is very famous, we actually saw some people make the goods in the show room..

We actually went her for buying a apple pie, but this shop was full of hello kitty.....

and this strange stone...

Hirosaki is a very small city and there is not many tourist spots here!!! Hirosaki Castle is the most famous, and here is the second famous spot- Old Aomori Bank Building!!  An European style building!

Crow is another common thing you can find in Japan.  Sometimes, we're very scary of them when there were a group of crows at the top of your head!!  I don't know why how come there are that much crow in Japan!

So after a long day travel, finally we could enjoy a delicious and big dinner~

Our food...

The dessert~~

Red bean bun

The restaurant we went!

On the way we back to the hotel, we found this karaoke, it's so fancy....

What is that????  The heaven of man????????  I wanted to ask Alban to get in to have some inspection, but he rejected me!!

This club may look more normal!!! 

After a long day, we came back to the hotel and Alban tried to look cool with that sleeping cloth!!!  At the same time, you could see our bedroom was so messy already!!!