We woke up to more cold rain this morning, so took a brief taxi to Sapporo station instead of walking. We stocked up on snacks for the train and then set off for the 3.5 hour journey to a peninsula on a bigger peninsula at the base of Hokkaido, Hakodate.

I say it every time we take a train: I love train travel. I can happily sit and look out of the window for the whole time. Today I did that, read some of my book, and took a nap. Nick watched the final World Series game the whole time. Millie watched a movie and did some drawing.

She woke me up from my nap to show me this one. I was very annoyed for 5 seconds until I saw what she drew.

For most of the journey we had ocean on one side of the train, and rainbow trees on the other. Heaven.

We arrived in Hakodate, which feels like a small town in the Pacific Northwest. It’s fun to see “small town” Japan after only ever visiting larger cities. We checked into our Airbnb and relaxed for a while.

At about 3 we walked over to the local grocery store to stock up on breakfast food for the morning. Browsing the aisles made me excited to get home and learn how to make the Korean and Japanese food we love so much. I can’t wait to venture out the Asian grocery stores in North Austin.

As we were leaving the grocery store we noticed there was a line outside of a little restaurant across the street. Our can’t-skip-a-line disease is now Stage 4, so we promptly dropped off our groceries and then went to stand in it. We waited for about 45 minutes as it started to get dark and then rain.

We got in and were welcomed with big bowls of warm ramen. The style (shiro) served in Hakodate is different than what we had in Sapporo (miso). It’s lighter and less salty, but still plenty flavorful. They are flavored with seafood so Millie didn’t like it nearly as much as the previous ones. I agree that miso is better, but it is so rich I would probably not have it much if we lived here. The seafood wontons in tonight’s bowl were my favorite part.

We slurped it down and walked home in the cold cold rain.