Day 34, in which we thank the gods for pink peppercorns

We tried the diner across the road from our hotel for breakfast today, which boasts having 'the first and finest self-service drinks counter in Japan' – a strange claim, perhaps, but with unlimited refills on coffee, ice tea and fruit juices all for just 75p, it certainly appealed to us.

Having already 'done' the Atom Bomb in Hiroshima – during which we learned about as much as you could read on wikipedia about the bombing, but with more pictures – we were not in much of a mood to repeat the whole exercise in Nagasaki (the principal difference being they got a plutonium rather than uranium bomb). So we skipped all that and stuck to the south of the city, which was largely overlooked by the bomb and so has a lot of buildings from the Meji era intact.

Our first stop was Glover Park, a lovely hillside park close to our hotel where the Nagasaki government has relocated a half dozen colonial era buildings in an outdoor museum of Japan's first proper interaction with the west. These included the tiny bungalow of a Mr Walker who brought the railways, industrial manufacturing and what became the Kirin brewery to Japan, and the Glover House, where former arms-dealer Mr Glover and his wife introduced education and commerce, while also secretly conspiring to change the very nature of Japanese government. Glover was also Scottish, which I suppose answers my question of why tartan is still so popular in Japanese school uniforms.

The park was very neatly laid out, and easy to get around thanks to a series of escalators and moving walkways. Nearby we also visited the Dutch Slopes, the original western enclave, so named as it's up a hill and most of the early foreigners were traders from Holland. This was pretty much a redux of our walk around Glover Park, with two traditional colonial buildings to snoop around, and largely the same views down the hill into the harbour.

The tourist information map made a great fuss about the "Site of the Former Dutch Factory on Dejima", an island which for 200 years was the only place foreigners were allowed to engage in trade or commerce. We happened to pass it on our way north through it is quite a mystery why it is still on the tourist maps. The original site has now been demolished, while land reclamation projects mean this isolated trading post is now so far from being an island it is actually a third of a kilometre inland. We didn't therefore stop.

A highlight of the day was taking the ropeway (or, cable car) up to the Mount Inasa Lookout, which commands an amazing 360 degree view across Nagasaki, from the city where we had started, round to the industrial harbour and out to the sea on the other side of the mountain, where the sun was setting behind a small group of islands. It was all rather special, and so to celebrate we drank two beers and waited for night to fall, when the city's rather blunt edges were lost in the darkness, and their field of lights down in the valley made for a beautiful view.

We had dinner at a Russian-French restaurant called Harbin, in the Hamano-Machi Shopping Arcade. We had not intended to spend much on dinner, but this is effectively our last proper night in Japan so we figured we might as well have a bit of a blow out: a scallop ceviche with a dill and pink peppercorn twist started the meal and was the first real burst of flavour we've enjoyed for weeks. We wept, rent our clothes and praised god for pink peppercorns. Slow-cooked shoulder of black pork and a rich and almost stew-like borscht followed, but alas Paul was let down by his beef stroganoff, which amounted to amazingly tender pieces of beef lost in a vat of cream. Only my lamb hotpot - served inexplicably from a two-litre earthenware jug, but fizzing and tasting softly of cumin - saved the day.

We had another spa bath, but this time in the ladies' pool since the men's was closed. Oddly, the women's pool is half the size of the men's. I guess the men in Japan are just generally more dity than the women.