Coast to coast: Day 4

I'm at the halfway point of my vacation, both geographically and time-wise, and (good news!) I'm on the mend from whatever I had that made me feel so crappy yesterday.

Squeezed a lot in today, although fortunately I didn't feel rushed.  After checking out of my hotel I had an hour to kill so I bought a little apple tart and then went to a cafe to get some hot milk and charge my iPod before heading out of town.  Enjoyed a leisurely 90 minute ride up to Aomori City, a port city that I visited for the first time three years ago.

View from the train window about an hour outside of Aomori City

Aomori wasn't one of the stops I'd originally planned on, but when I realized that traveling to Hirosaki meant a transfer there, I decided to get off the train for a couple of hours.  The weather was beautiful and I wanted to walk around a little.  I went up to the observation deck at ASPAM (Aomori's Tourist Center), a giant pyramid-looking building which *actually* is meant to be in the shape of a letter "A".  Spent a while enjoying the blue skies and the view across Aomori Bay.

My next and final destination for the day was Hirosaki, another city I'd visited 3 years ago. Hirosaki is famous for its park filled with cherry trees that are usually in bloom during Golden Week (the week of national holidays during the first few days of May).  This time, I'm a week too late to see everything at its peak, but I was still able to track down a couple of trees with a bit of pink left:

I was also able to see the castle, which I'd thought I wouldn't be able to do since I'd read that they're readying to move it to another location in the park in order to do renovation on its stone walls. I'd heard the work was going to start as soon as cherry blossom season ended, so I was surprised to see it still intact.





I stayed in the park for about two hours, wandering around taking photos.  Funny story: the first time I was here I stopped to listen to a shamisen (a Japanese 3-stringed instrument) performance and an elderly man approached me and asked if I wanted to come enjoy a picnic with him and his colleagues.  Long story short(er), I ended up spending the entire rest of the afternoon with 7 friendly salarymen.  The two that were closest to my age took me on a tour around the park and one of them took a whole bunch of photos, promising to e-mail them to me. But it turns out he must have been drunker than he seemed because I never heard from him again and I assume he forgot. (I wonder what he thought later when he found all of these pictures of me on his camera...) So this time, it was my goal to get some shots of the places I didn't last time.

The trees lining both sides of the river are cherry trees--this whole place was pink a little over a week ago...

Isn't that mallard gorgeous? He looks like someone painted those colors on him.

Eventually, I made my way back to the benches at the top of the hill to wait for the sun to go down behind Mt. Iwaki (different from Mt. Iwate, from Day 2). I only ended up with one photo of this mountain on my last visit, and it was pretty overcast that day. It was well worth the 45 minute wait for this sunset:

A lovely way to end the day.  Tomorrow's the highlight of my trip: a 4.5 hour train journey down the coastline to my next (and final) stop!