Hakodate, corner

Posting these little photos makes me look back on my time in Japan. I have a kind of need for them.

I have others: even smaller ones, for example, than the ugly and otherwise beautiful waterfront where we lived for almost two weeks. Some with clouds towering over the city.

Hakodate is a town to browse around, in Hokkaido. You can also get there easily, say, from Tokyo: by shinkansen followed by a small regional. First port to welcome foreign ships after a few centuries of being closed to the outside world. So on the hill there are houses of charm, in styles reminiscent of those of northern Europe, but which are genuinely Japanese. There is a curious palace, which can be visited, painted blue and yellow: from the terrace you can see the bay.

There is a bakery, which you can spend hours on, in which we would have stayed even more, talking about recent Japan, which is not yet in the books.

One evening in Hakodate, we walked straight toward the setting sun and arrived at the harbor and started playing with two cats chasing our pocket aquilone (something you really don't want to walk around without).