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- May 7, 2024, 6:44pm
- ☁️ 14 °C
- Altitude: 13 m
- JapanAomoriAomori ShiShinmachiAomori Eki40°49’50” N 140°44’10” E
Day 67-68
May 7 in Japan ⋅ ☁️ 14 °C
Day 67
Today we packed up our backpacks once more and headed north to Aomori which is the most northern prefecture on Honshu island for our last few days before heading back to Tokyo.
After an easy few hours travelling we arrived in Aomori and dropped off our bags and the first place we wanted to visit on our list today was The Aomori Nebuta Festival cultural museum. This festival is held every year in summer and was traditionally held to ward off evil spirits and to protect the farmers crops for the rest of the year. Huge floats are paraded through the city and in the museum we got to get up close to some of these really impressive works of art! The festival is held at nighttime so all the floats are installed with lights inside so they light up and they are huge! I imagine an incredible sight during the festival as just seeing them in the museum was very impressive.
The next stop on our list was the A factory which stands for apple factory. What Aomori is famous for is apples as they are the largest producer of apples in Japan. The a factory sells lots of apple related products including the biggest apples I have ever seen! The photo doesn’t do it justice but I’d say they were about 3x bigger than the apples we have in the uk! We then tasted a few different apple ciders or cidre as it is called here. I discovered I prefer the sweeter apple cider whilst Jacob prefers the dry.
We finished the day off with a walk along the seafront with a very distant view of Hokkaido peeping through the fog.
Day 68
We started today at Sannai Maruyama Site which is the largest and most complete preserved village from the Jomon period (13000-300bc). Registered as a world heritage site in 2021 it definitely sparks your imagination about what life would have been like back then! They were definitely a lot shorter back then as you can go into the preserved huts and buildings and all the entrances are absolutely tiny, we had to crouch and shuffle through! I haven’t felt that tall on our trip to japan until today where I felt like a giant! They also had items such as pottery on display that had been found during the excavation. It was really interesting and looked similar to Anglo-Saxon settlements.
After this we visited the Hakkodamaru Memorial Ship. This bright yellow ship used to connect Aomori with Hakodate city on Hokkaido island shipping everything from people to trains. We wondered through preserved cabins, the engine room and ended up on the vehicle deck which could hold up to 48 rail cars on four separate tracks which is really impressive. I’ve never really thought about ferries transporting trains but if we can transport cars I guess it shouldn’t be so far fetched!
A very history centred day today ranging from 13000bc- 1988 a pretty impressive range!Read more
Traveler Definitely a time travel kind of day. The huts look almost African - you had me fooled for a moment 😜
Traveler What are these? They look like the loos at Pompei!