Interestingly, the area near the foot of Mount Hakodate is known as Motomachi, which translates as original town, which probably explains the presence of the old Hakodate Public Hall a European-style building which housed Hakodate's government in the early twentieth century. Equally interesting is the fact that Kobe, Nagasaki and Yokohama also feature districts bearing the same name.
We took a lengthy ramble through the hillside section of the area, passing Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Episcopal Churches, the old and Russian and British Consulates, and the Higashi Honganji Temple and made our way down to the red brick warehouses along the waterfront which have been redeveloped into a trendy shopping, dining and entertainment complex. It’s a prime example of the sort of shopping you tend to find in a touristy area of a gift-oriented society as well as a hub of the city's eating and drinking activities. We also passed Japan’s first concrete electricity pole, and located the Spanish style eatery Madam had selected as a possible dinner option.
By this time we were waiting for sunset, since the third leg of the Hakodate trifecta involved an ascent of Mount Hakunodate to view one of the best three nighttime vistas in Japan (alongside Nagasaki's Mount Inasa and Kobe's Mount Rokko) that happens to be rated the equal of the evening views across Naples and Hong Kong. The rambling had just about run out of possibilities around four, so with a good hour and a half to wait for the bus that would take us to the summit we headed back to the hotel for a brief spell.
The helpful advice we'd received on arrival hadn't quite turned out to be on the money, since he'd advised against the purchase of a day long tram ticket, which seemed to cost more than the likely sum total of fares between the railway station and the fortress and back to Motomachi, but we both agreed that if we'd shelled out for the day pass we might have headed further around to the Foreigners' Cemetery rather than moseying back to the accommodation.
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