View of Aomori as our ship sailed into the harbor.
The pyramid-shaped building is ASPAM, Aomori Prefecture Tourism Information Center (青森県観光物産館 ASPAM),
with shops, restaurants, and a TI to give out maps and brochures.

The city welcomed us with song and dance at the pier.

Our jumbo taxi was a very comfortable Toyota Hiace van, which seemed to be very popular in Japan.
Our driver spoke limited English, but he did his best to communicate with us.
Here, at our first stop, Stanley exchanged cell numbers with him in case we needed to call him.

Our first stop was the Fujita Memorial Garden at the southwest of Hirosaki Park.
It is named after its first owner, Fujita Kenichi, one of the leading prosperous businessmen in Japan
before the Second World War.
Mr. Fujita hired Japanese garden architects from Tokyo to build this garden in 1919.

This garden is made up of 2 parts, the Western-style garden on the upper level
and a Japanese-style garden on the lower level 13 meters down.
Here, we were in the lower part, in front of a Japanese tea room.

For the next two stops, a merchant house and an old samurai house, both located just north of Hirosaki Park,
our driver had difficulties finding them.
That meant he had not been asked to drive to these places before.
He parked the van at a roadside mall by the park to ask for directions.
Suzette snapped this picture of beautiful apples on a roadside apple tree.

The driver walked us quite a way to find this old merchant house, the Ishiba Family Residence 石場家住宅.
It occupied the leftmost few doors of this building.

Inside the merchant's house.
An old lady was mining the house/shop. She said we could pay 100 yen/pp to look at the back of the house,
which we did not do.
I wonder if she still lived in this house and if she ever wished to live in a house with modern conveniences.

The next task was to find the former Sasamori Family Residence 旧笹森家住宅.
There were several samurai houses clustered in this area just north of the park.
I picked the Sasamori Family Residence to visit based on the Google photos seen online beforehand.
The wooden board in this picture above listed several samurai houses and if they were open for a visit on this day.
Our driver used a printed paper map, and we used Google Maps on iPhone. Eventually, we helped to find the Sasamori Family Residence.

The history of the house was explained in 4 languages.
This house belonged to a middle- to low-ranking samurai family.

There was a volunteer guide from the city who came to this house to assist in case any visitors showed up.
(He was the guy on the far right wearing a plaid shirt and a white face mask.)
He spoke English, so he was able to explain things to us as we walked from room to room.
Stanley said the style of this house reminded him of our maternal grandfather's dormitory at Taiwan Sugar Company (台糖宿舍)
in the 1950s

At the end of the 5-hour tour, we asked our driver to drop us off at Aomori's A-Factory,
an apple-themed goods store,
so that we could do a bit of sightseeing and shopping near the port before walking back to the ship.
We walked past the ASPAM building.

Noordam, our cruise ship, was just behind us.

The balcony stateroom Meggy and I shared.
We put in a request several months ago to Holland America to convert our room to 2 twin beds for our sailing.

Dinner at the dining room. (Suzette was behind the camera.)
Our travel agent from VacationsToGo.com gifted each of our rooms a bottle of champagne.
This evening, we toasted the first bottle of champagne.

Dinner's main course, 5-spiced pork belly with plum sauce.
It was very good.