Exploring Hakodate, Japan π―π΅ | Seafood Market, Tram Ride & Local Eats!
[Music] Lynn and Paul’s Excellent Adventure, a 4-year voyage while living on a cruise ship. [Applause] [Music] Oh, I can’t believe it, Lynn. We are in Japan. Okad, Japan. It’s our first stop in Japan. Hard to believe. Of course, you can tell by the umbrella that we’re getting a little rain this morning. Supposed to break loose uh a little later, probably about 1:00. Uh we’re walking over to the tram station. Look at all the seafood. Oh, it looks wonderful. by your crabs and Oh, look at those crab legs. Oh, yeah. Beautiful. So, 11,000 yen. Oh, you’re going to ask for a conversion, right? It’s a 100 to that. We’ll have to calculate that. It’s 400 yen to a dollar. Is that it? I think it is 400 yen. So, you can do the math at home. But, uh, the It’s all fresh seafood. I mean, this is the seafood market. Oh, look at the Oh my goodness. Look at that. Who would have thought? That’s incredible. So, is this part of the This must be part of the official market then. It is. Look at all the crabs. Oh, muscles, clams. That is incredible. Wow. Oh. So, I guess if you’re in business or home, you just come down here and get your fresh seafood. Yes, this is really I mean it’s amazing. This we just stepped off the ship. We just left the cruise terminal. We went through immigration and they welcomed us. Very polite people. Yes. Here in polite, very clean city. Oh, it really is. Um they even told us to bring like a little plastic bag to put our own trash in cuz there are no trash cans. Yeah. So, you’re responsible for your own trash. Yeah. which seems to make me think that there’s not a lot of things that are in packages. Yes, that’s probably true. Hopefully. So, you know, when you have this many people on these islands, I mean, you there’s only so much you can do. Look at this squid. Oh, there’s our calamari. Yes. Fresh squid. Wow. Can’t beat that. So, the plan today is that we’re going to go to the U tram and we’re going to buy a day pass. 600 yen and uh we’re going to just at first just maybe do a little tour of the city. So, welcome to Hokate. Okay, so we’ve we’re on our way to the tram as we mentioned, but we also noticed a market here. You want to take a little stroll through the market a little bit? Let’s take a stroll. Yeah, let’s see. Cuz we’re finding all kinds of interesting things. Little side trip here. Quite cool. Now, this is supposed to be a morning market, right? They close up at like 1:00 in the afternoon. Cantaloupe. Oh, look at that. Oh, fresh cantaloupe. That you’d like that. That’s beautiful, scallops, clams. You can tell this is definitely an area for seafood. That’s for sure. Look how beautiful. And the way they display it is just incredible. Look over here. Oh, such a beautiful market though, isn’t it? And I think this is multi level. There’s a actually an elevator there. So, they look like they have some kind of ice cream in there. I know. It’s a little early, but well, looks good. Yeah, I think it works. I mean, just the way they display things is really quite amazing. It’s quite beautiful. Crab for breakfast. It’s a beautiful market though, isn’t it? Beautiful. Yes. People waiting in line here. Yeah. Oh, maybe. Oh, it’s a Oh, see, look this. They’re It’s Oh, they’re waiting in line for the It’s sushi. It’s a sushi bar. Look. Can you get a camera? It’s moving. Well, I am sure we are going to see a lot of sushi here in Japan. But you can see the people just waiting in line. It’s still moving. Wow. But that’s that looks like squid. Oh, is it? It look like it. Look how fine they thin they chop everything. These are real artists, aren’t they? It’s amazing. Sushi is a real art. Yes, it is. Onward. Okay, we made it to the tram station where we had a couple things we had to do. Number one, we had to find the bathrooms. Yes. And you were able to go to the bathroom and it is a different uh culture here. So, were you prepared for that? I had heard about it but was not really prepared. I mean, this is a country that invented those fancy Toto toilets that talk to you, right? So, yeah, part of the adventure. We also had to get some yen. Uh, we want to be able to carry some yen for things we might want to purchase. We went to the the place where a lot of people uh uh go to an ATM is the 7-Elevens here. And they are they’re 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven. here in the States and you remember I don’t even know if 7-Elevens are around in the States anymore. That’s right. They weren’t in our town anymore, but um they uh are definitely prominent here and they’re beautiful. Nice stores. Everything here is so clean. That’s the amazing thing. So, I bought Yeah, you bought some little tasty snacks. Poppy Poppy Now, what are poppy? I’ve never heard of poppies. Pocky Pocky Pocky Pocky chocolates. Okay. Yeah, they’re just little cookie sticks dipped in chocolate. And then I bought these cuz these looked really good. They’re just little almond cookies. Almond cookies. So I just I shouldn’t buy sugar. But I know it was We did get water, too. We did get water. We did get water, too. And we’re getting We’re trying to figure out the tram where we need to go here. Um that coffee place is upstairs if we want to buy some ground coffee. We’ll buy some ground coffee, but we would like to experience some Japanese coffee. So, we hope they really have those. So, we’re just trying to reorganize and we’re going to figure out the tram next. Okay. Well, here you got to try one of these. Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, these are night. These are pretty neat. All right. Well, that’s these are tasty. I like them. That’s what we need. All right. We took the tram ride. We figured it out. Uh when you board the tram, you uh scan your uh carda card, which is a green card, which we use for transportation. I think we’ll be able to use that all over Japan. You go in the rear door and you swipe it, and then when you leave, you go out the front door and you swipe it. Mhm. So, um kind of a neat system. It’s pretty quick. Not too bad. Now we have a uh 10-minute walk. We’re going to do over to the ropeway. It’s a ropeway tram that we’re going to be taking. It’s going to take us to the top of the hill. Yeah, it’s very foggy up there. Very cloudy. So, I don’t know how much we’re going to do. It’ll probably be beautiful. Yeah, I think it will. But it should be fun. It’s something kind of neat to do. But you’re kind of getting a feel for what the city looks like. It’s a neat city. Very clean, as we said. Quiet. Very quiet. Even the cars are quiet. Yes, they are. you know, and not a lot of people out walking. No, it’s a big town. You said it’s what, 200,000 people? Yeah, I think so. So, a good size town. In some areas, it feels bigger. Transportation here is really incredible, though. We were at the train station and they have trains going all the way to Saporro. Every Oh, everywhere, I’m sure. Not just there. Well, Saporro is one of the main train trips I know at the airport there. Yeah. Okay. So, let’s go look for the ropeway. So, we made it to the tram. On the way up, it was starting to rain pretty hard. It rained really hard. It did. So, we’re at the tram station. They said that they’re not going to run the uh ropeway ropeway tram um till they know when the weather clears. That could be not the rest of the day. So, we’ll probably go look for lunch. It’s funny though that we’re here because they have a community radio station. It seems like radio stations tend to find me sometimes and you can see them actually broadcasting there on the air. And it’s a community radio station. So it must be like um uh like a public station. Yeah, it is community. They’ve been doing this interview here for a while. You can kind of hear in the background. Um it looks like the primary announcer is a lady announcer. Can I put my microphone up there? Yeah, you can. Let everybody hear a little bit of it. Okay, I’ll have to uh now get my translator app out, I think, and just see what they were talking about. Well, let’s see if we can find our way back into town. Okay. All right. So, we’re at Lucky Perau. Lunchtime. lunchtime. It’s an American It’s It’s an American chicken sandwich style. Yes. That’s what they sell. I didn’t see any sushi on their menu. Do they have sushi on their menu? No sushi, but they had a hamburger, a pork cutlet. Yeah. But chicken chicken sandwiches and French fries is what? And French fries. And we got ginger ale to drink. Ginger ale. So, uh very American place, American type place to eat. Um it was on the we must do must see uh stops while we’re here. So we that’s what we did. Yeah. So we’re doing this isn’t far from the ship but we noticed that they had other locations around town. So it must be very popular. So we decided to get lunch because we couldn’t go up the ropeway. Couldn’t up the ropeway. But you found some vending machines at the ropeway place that were quite interesting. Uh they were very interesting. What was one of the vending machines you noticed? What did they have? For snacks. For snacks. For snacks. It was just a snack machine. Uh there was a toy machine, but yeah. Uh yeah, the snack machine was very interesting because it had little snacks of insects. What insects did it have? It had scorpions and crickets and a mixture of worms. And so did did you didn’t try any of them though? No. We don’t eat bugs. No. No. Very interesting though. The whole machine was actually that way. I mean they had next to it they had a machine that had like wonderful dis ice cream. It’s interesting. Like prepackaged. They’re very innovative here in Japan. I will say this has really been quite fascinating. We took a taxi back and you use over to this restaurant and the taxi you use an app just like a um Uber app or a lift app and it pays it it takes care and pays for it. The taxi was there in like 2 minutes and it was like $4 and it was like $4 to ride here. It wasn’t that far granted, but it wasn’t very expensive. Very clean cab. The uh driver was wearing a white shirt. A nice dress shirt. White dress shirt. So very nicely dressed. Yeah. And very professional. We used our translate app to ask a little bit about town and he kind of laughed about uh about us using that. But he we found that people laugh at us using a translator app. I don’t know why. I would think actually I think they appreciate it really because instead of people trying to force English and and say you know city or town or rain or whatever when you translate I think they appreciate that too. So it’s kind of neat. It’s kind of neat. Okay. So we’ll show you what our lunch looks like here in just a moment. So we’ve got our sandwiches. These are supposedly the best chicken sandwiches in Japan, or at least at least in this city. We’ll see. Oh, they look fabulous. Do you like that? I’m going to take stuff off of mine. We did get fries. Oh, look. It’s like chicken nuggets. Like chicken pieces. Interesting. Oh, yeah. You didn’t order yours without lettuce. Mayonnaise. Mayonnaise. Mayonnaise. Good. You going to take a bite? Well, let me get You’re taking the mayonnaise off. I haven’t even opened mine yet. I I’ll have to do that. But it doesn’t feel so fresh. I I did notice they had sesame. Yeah, all sesame. I noticed they had um these all over town. So, this is very popular food item even with locals here. [Music] It’s like eating very good Chinese food on a bun. Oh yeah. You know how you get like sweet and sour chicken or teriyaki chicken? It’s very good though. It’s a good mix. I liked it. It’s a good sandwich. Thumbs up. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
Weβve made it to our very first port in Japan β beautiful Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido! π―π΅ Despite a bit of rain, we jumped right into the adventure with a stroll through the famous Hakodate Morning Market, where we were blown away by the incredible displays of fresh seafood, crab legs, and even live squid. π¦π
After exploring the market and grabbing a few snacks (yes, Pocky and almond cookies included), we hopped on the Hakodate tram using our IC card and headed toward the Mt. Hakodate Ropeway β only to find it closed due to weather. But not to worry! We stumbled into a community radio station, discovered some very interesting insect vending machines, and finished the day with a stop at the popular Lucky Pierrot for one of the best chicken sandwiches in Japan π.
This episode captures the charm, hospitality, and surprises of Hakodate β from clean streets and friendly locals to tech-savvy taxis and delicious food. Whether you’re planning a cruise stop or just dreaming of Japan, this video offers a slice of local life and off-the-beaten-path fun.
ποΈ Travel Tip: Hakodateβs tram system is affordable and easy to navigate with an IC card. Morning market closes by 1:00 PM, so start early!
1 Comment
You guys are having a great adventure