When the Captain starts his morning port arrival message for Akita by saying “ . . .it’s snowing, the most I’ve ever seen,” you know that can’t be good. And it was really coming down. As we slid into port, it looked like we were docking in Siberia (or at least what I could imagine, bleak, cloudy, and snowing, with industrial wind turbines whirling and a plant emitting plums of smoke).

I had some pretty adventurous plans for today but scaled back due to the weather. We started out later than intended, the snow stopped and some blue sky was peaking through the clouds. After taking the shuttle into town we walked to the train station. Akita is a pretty big city, (300,000) full of modern buildings, hotels, malls etc. Yes, this is where the Akita dogs originally come from. You see images of the dogs and stuffed dog toys everywhere. There is even a GIANT Akita dog in the middle of the train station. After reviewing the schedules at the station, I felt it was too risky to try and get to and from Kakuodate with enough time to see the samurai district, so we fell back to plan B.

First, we spent a chunk of time purchasing our tickets between Kobe and Kyoto for next week. The Japanese host on board our cruise ship advised we take care of this at the much smaller and relatively quiet Akita station. Not only is Kobe larger, but it should be peak cherry blossom time with a lot of train traffic. I’m glad we got the tickets, because it wasn’t exactly easy, and took longer than we thought to make sure we got it right.

We took a bus intending to ride around but decided to get off and explore Senshu Park. There were very few others in the park so we had a very peaceful experience wandering the grounds that previously housed Kubota Castle. Today, gates, a turret, and a guardhouse have been reconstructed.  Snow was beginning to melt and fall off the castle gate and you could see the bumps on the branches of the cherry trees that will soon blossom. We knew we would not be seeing any blooms in this part of the country, but visitors in mid-April will have quite a show.

Walking back to our bus stop, we found ourselves in the middle of the conclusion of the Akita University graduation celebration. All the young men were in trim, dark suits with ties and the young women were mostly wearing traditional kimono outfits. There were lots of smiles, flowers, and photos. They were an impressive-looking group.

BTW, despite the fact Japanese students study English for about 10 years, we find very few who speak proficiently. That being said, everyone is polite and helpful, and since we are all fairly proficient with various translation apps – we manage to communicate!