The ramen arrived in a large bowl of stock, and having once again left Hughesy's fork at the hotel I had no choice but to have a go with the chopsticks. As it turned outI could have asked for a fork since my unorthodox but highly effective chopstick technique prompted one of the waiters to deliver one. By that point, however, I'd demolished about 90% of the noodle content, so the fork remained where it had been placed.
From there we headed into the Tower for a panoramic view across the city as a whole and the fortress in particular, and we made our way back downstairs after a wander around the historical explanations and little dioramas and headed for the fortress itself, where the defensive walls had been planted with sakura, providing the basis for what could have been an extensive photographic session.
We had, however, other fish to fry so we made our way back to the tram line and headed for the old Foreign Quarter. As one of the first ports opened to foreign shipping you might have tipped great things for Hakodate, but relative isolation (which was, I suspect,one of the reasons why the port was selected in the first place) meant the city was bypassed by later, more centrally positioned rivals. That, of course, means much of what was built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is still there, assuming it wasn't destroyed in the 1907 fire, and much of what fell victim to the flames seems to have been rebuilt in a similar style.