Aomori/Hirosaki Castle

So…. Let’s take a moment to grumble. Since I got on the ship and even before, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get us to the Sakura Matsuri Cherry Blossom Festival in Hirosaki. The city is at least an hour away by bus or train. We arrive in Aomori at 7, no idea how long it would take us to actually get off the ship and to the main station to catch said bus/train. No matter how I ran the numbers I couldn’t guarantee that we would get back to the ship by all aboard time at 4:30pm. So we bite the bullet and go to the excursion desk. Lo and behold there an excursion exactly where I wanted to go. But not an online listing or even in the NCL app, but printed on a sheet of paper set up next to the adverts for Mandala Spa.

Great, problem solved, right? Nope-sold out. We were put on the waiting list with 15 people ahead of us. Now, I think I handled the disappointment well (mostly) and mom rallied to speak with a different person whilst I sulked. No dice.

I proceeded to sulk at dinner. I sulked through my soft serve ice cream. I managed to take a pretty picture of Hakodate lit up at night. Then I sulked back down to our room convinced I’d blown any hope of getting to Hirosaki…

We had tickets waiting for us at our door. To Hirosaki…I sulked for nothing…

Now back to our regularly scheduled story…

Up around 6:30 and had breakfast then headed to the Starlight Theater to meet up with the group. We were in the first bus and our guide was Junko-San. We rode about an hour and a half to Hirosaki.

First stop was Tsugaru Neputa Village. There we heard shamisen, taiko and shakuhachi instruments and admired their fan shaped floats. The workshop was fun as many artisans were there working. The spinning top toy maker and I kinda gambled what number the top would stop on and I won. I even found Sakura themed Ichigo Daifuku.

We walked to Hirosaki Castle next. The cherry blossoms weren’t completely out, most were just buds. Still very pretty and our group was pretty cool. We didn’t get a lot of history though. It was built in the Warring States period and was the seat of the Tsugaru clan who were overthrown at the beginning of the Meiji period.

It was tricky to keep everyone together so one of the participants shouted for everyone to line up, we did, and it worked. Hahaha and there were no kids in our group. But half of us grabbed some Festival food…I got a blue chocolate banana. We got back at 2. We were supposed to get a meal with the excursion but that didn’t happen. Still we were able to see many things and talk to a lot of interesting people.

Back on the boat we tried the Movie Kiss trivia with Yanar. We did ok but it was all kinda silly. E we made paper flowers with the splash kiddo team and tried trivia again. We bombed spectacularly. Saw the show “We Will Rock You” lots of good music and exceptional dancing.

Both of us are tired so we will turn in early tonight.Read more