Good morning and welcome to Aomori Prefecture.
Aomori is located at the top of Honshu island, the main island in Japan.
I used to live near here and I absolutely love this area.
So I'm really excited to show it to you guys. This is actually the first day of a four day trip.
I'm going to be spending three days in Aomori
and then the last day I'm going to be heading up to Hokkaido for my first time.
So I think we're gonna have lots of fun.
Aomori Prefecture is famous for the summer festival, Nebuta.
Nebuta Festival takes place the first week of August every year
and there you can see these amazingly intricate, brightly colored lantern floats.
The floats are made of a wire frame and then they're covered in rice paper,
which is sealed together with a paraffin wax.
Let's try on a Nebuta hat.
Something like that.
Next, we're gonna try sticking the rice paper to the flip frame.
The less glue, the better..
apparently.
The paper squares are glued down one by one, and then the joints are sealed with paraffin wax.
And after that is all complete, then the painting can start.
Prime craftsmanship.
Aomori is famous for apples. We're in the gift shop right now.
And there are apple souvenirs everywhere. There's even fresh apples are in front of me here.
Right next to the Nebuta Museum is a store called A-Factory,
which has a huge selection of souvenirs from Aomori,
so if you're looking for a gift for your friends or family, this is probably the best place to get that.
We've been given a card with 900 yen on it
and we're gonna use this to get some sake tasting samples.
Where should we start?
It's 100 yen for the small one, so let's do that.
Cheers!
Next up is some fresh apple sherbet.
They have tons of different flavors, but because we're in Aomori, we need to try the apple.
Aomori is definitely the place to come for all things apple. Everything just tastes amazing.
So we just got in a taxi and we're...we're just gonna explore the area. We honestly have no idea where to go.
We found a park nearby, so we're gonna check out the park.
It's right on the coast of the ocean, so it should be pretty at least.
Taxi driver was just asking us what we're planning on doing there and I said "I have no idea,"
and he's like, "Well, there's nothing to do there."
But I don't know where else to go, so we're gonna start with the park and see what happens there.
[Music]
This park is great! I don't know what the taxi guy was talking about.
This would be a great place for a picnic. We're just saying.."We should have a picnic here, "
but we're going for dinner next, so we probably shouldn't eat anything.
So we're just outside in downtown Aomori now and we're heading for dinner
and we're going to a place called Ringo Bako (apple box). It's a shamisen bar.
They're gonna be playing shamisen in the background while we eat. It sounds really cool.
Wow!
It's nice!
One of the other girls just figured out why their restaurant is called "apple box"
All the tables and the benches are made from apple boxes.
That's really cute!
Arigatou Gozaimasu (Thank you)
Veggie appetizers. Menma (pickled bamboo shoots), my favorite!
[Shamisen Tuning]
[Shamisen Playing]
We're all finished dinner now. That was really yummy! It was a really interesting selection of foods.
It was really fun to try out some new things.
Lots of local foods.
And the atmosphere inside Ringo Bako was amazing!
Highly recommend that you visit there. The performances are during lunchtime and at 7 p.m.
They just play a few songs, so make sure you're there on time for that. You don't wanna miss that.
We're gonna head back to the hotel now
and go to sleep and we'll be up early tomorrow morning, so I'll see you again tomorrow! Bye!
Good morning guys! Welcome to day 2 of my trip.
I had a lovely sleep in my hotel room. We stayed in a hotel in Aomori last night.
Would give you guys a quick tour, so I had two huge beds to myself.
Didn't need that much space, but it was nice.
This is a shower area.
This is the makeup area here.
That's about it, so I'm just packing up my stuff, gonna head downstairs and we're heading to an onsen now.
[Music]
This onsen (hot spring bath) is known for being a healing onsen.
And lots of people come here to stay for several nights if they have a disease or an injury, so they have rooms
that they can stay in and they also had a nurse's office, where they can go
and get advice about how often they should go in the bath, how long they should do it for, and etc.
That's called toji in Japanese. "To" is having a bath, and "ji" is healing.
They also have a Ryokan, Japanese style hotel for regular customers.
It smells so nice in here. I love the tatami smell. Look at that!
Wow the water is so clear!
So pretty, the fall leaves just starting to change.
Bought some fresh corn at the gift shop to hold me over until lunch.
It looks so good! It's so yellow! It's so bright in color!
Oh my God! I'm so excited!
It's so good! This is so sweet!
We're back on our bus now. And we're just driving through the forest on the way to Oirase Gorge.
And we're gonna be taking a walk outside, I think. There's a waterfall nearby. It's so gorgeous out here!
[Music]
We're gonna be using these magnifying glasses to examine the moss.
The guide was just explaining to us that this area used to be just rocks.
It'll mean with no plants whatsoever.
But, because of the river developing here,
moss was able to grow on top of the rocks and then, within that moss
the seeds of plants landed and plants started to grow here.
So that's how this gigantic forest was formed.
Wow, sugoi (wonderful)!
Really cool mushrooms. Wow! These are called raccoons fart.
Ready?
Go!
These like, and have the name of hieroglyphics in Japanese because they look like writing.
We've just arrived at Towada Lake. It's huge!
We have about half an hour to kill and then we're gonna rent a boat and go for a ride on the lake. Looks exciting.
Got some grilled mochi here.
So good! Oh my God! Heaven! I can eat like 10 of these sticks!