Kanazawa day 3 and last

I started our last full day at 7am by taking pictures at the fishmarket. They were only setting up but it was nice as I was the only non-worker there. It was freezing though.

I got back to the hotel via a supermarket to buy some mochi to make-do for the lack of sugar in the all-Japanese breakfast. The female cashier chatted to me in decent French when she found out where I was from. She had started in English. Travelled to France 5 times so far. You’d think a cashier can’t afford all this travelling or speak at least 3 languages. There goes a cliché.

Back at the hotel we engaged in a planned gym session. Abs, push-ups, chair etc. Tough after so much eating and no sport whatever for a week. Then onsen for me. After which came the much needed breakkie: this time we had cold grilled sardines. Yummy.

Outside it was pretty warm: not a cloud and a very extrovert sun. Which was nice as we’d decided to visit the castle and gardens today. The castle was not visitable. From what I saw it was the expected thing, neither amazing nor too shabby, just massively long buildings with typical roofs and monumental doors. Yeah okay.

The gardens are described as the third best in the country. Very cute, lovely trees (80% of which are propped up by ropes and poles and sticks), ponds, waterfalls, pavillions. And there was a cherry tree area full of white, pink or reddish blossoms. Nice. But not ‘waw’. More zen than in your face, and as a result not that impressive (to me).

In the grove as I was taking pix by myself, an old man showed me his little finger. Had no idea what he was on about so I started playing, showing ‘three’ (cars) then ‘seven’ (wives).

When we got out of the grove and headed for the tea house, we bumped into him again and this time I understood what his little finger meant: ‘are you by yourself?’. So I showed him Alex and said ‘two’. To cut a long story short, he ended up invited us to the tea house and bought the entrance tickets (700 yen per person, about 4.5 GBP), which include cake and tea served on tatami by traditional ladies who turn the bowl of macha tea twice before giving it to you and say a little prayer when you sip. Lucky the cake was there and sweet because the tea was very bitter and quite undrinkable.

The old man was nice apart from the fact that he spoke no English whatever. Pfff. But the nice thing with Japanese is that despite knowing you don’t get a word they keep going on in Japanese anyway. So there’s no uncomfortable silence. In the end we didn’t know much more about him that before, but he’d been nice and showed us around the pavillion. We just are sure than he’s retired, from Toyama and didn’t work for either Panasonic, Nissan, Toyota or Toto (the toilet makers).

From the gardens we walked to the samurai district and ate… Indian… Very nice at that.

With a few more mochi down the throat in lieu of dessert, we crawled back to the ryokan and collapsed. Alex had a good hour’s sleep.

When we got out again it was nightfall. We borrowed the ryokan’s bikes and cycled to the small geisha district, really close-by. A wee stroll later we were back to our bikes, which we’d parked in front of a great looking place. Alex was reticent to go (as always) as she didn’t know what it was, and of course I wasn’t. Turned out it was a cocktail bar. There was a woman at one end of the counter, a man at the other, and the barman. We sat in between the two customers. The atmosphere was lovely, intimate, dimmed lights, jazz music (if I haven’t mentioned music in Japan yet, it’s been mostly jazz and classical music; once we had Japanese pop, and twice or thrice Anglophone pop), Japanese sitting, and a huge choice of drinks (like in Chez Quasimodo).

Alex went for a glass of white wine, which she said was very good. I started with a fresh mango and orange juice, followed up by a glass of Calvados. We chatted a bit with the barman and the guy to our left, who after a while got joined by another.

We talked whiskies, cognacs, calvados, sakes and baijiu (Chinese rice spirit). We laughed. And left. Indeed we had booked a table at the Italian we’d visited on our first night. Without noticing, our choice of restaurant has gently gone from 100% Japanese to less so. Maybe it’s the full-on breakfasts, extremely good but unusual (even to me). Anyway on our last full day in Kanazawa we had Jap breakkie, Indian lunch and Italian dinner.

Then we collapsed again, after a late-night onsen visit for me.

Very, very impressed by Kanazawa, even more than by Kyoto. Great mix of ambiances, great overall feel, great location. Lovely people too.

Kanazawa day 1 and 2

It was not the Shinkansen we took to come up here. The line will open in 2015. The Thunderbird train took us 2 hours 20 or so. It was raining.

Bit of context: we came here coz of the interesting history – the only city with Kyoto that has kept the geisha tradition alive and wasn’t bombed by the Yankees. It has a world famous contemporary art museum and the third best gardens in Japan. It’s also go the best shrimps of the country.

Kanazawa was rainy too. We dropped the bags at our first ryokan of the hols, a traditional inn with tatami and futon and onsen (public hot baths). Dinner, if you opt for it, is served in the room. You leave your shoes at the entrance, and jump into slippers which you can’t take inside your room. In your private loo there are loo sandals you can use.

It was past two and we headed for the next-door fishmarket, a famous one as seafood from Kanazawa is very highly regarded (the owner of Yulala in Vientiane, from Kyoto, warned me not to eat seafood in his hometown, but to wait until I got to Kanazawa). We settled for a sushi bar. Ah ah nice joke. There’s only sushi bars in the market.

I gave weird things a go, especially fatty tuna and three-way clam sushis. The tuna was not even pink, more like light brown. It felt like biting into vaguely resisting butter, was quite thick, tasted so so, although not of fish. The clam came on three separate bunches of rice, three separate parts. The first one I bit into, I had the impression of crunchy carrott. It didn’t taste of anything. The second was like cartilage and I spit it out. Only the third was lovely, extremely tender and tasting of something coming from the sea.The rest was more ‘normal’, lean red tuna, edamame, roe, seared bonito. No, we also had nice cucumber and plum rolls, a combo we didn’t know.

After that we bought some mochi, had coffee and took a taxi to the museum, a very nice round building with a lot of glass. Sadly no artwork was visible as they were preparing a new exhibition. Then we took the loop bus back to the fishmarket area.

We spent some time in the close-by shopping mall. Alex couldn’t believe how much stuff Muji sell: food, bicycles and the rest.

It was high time for the onsen. The water was boiling hot in the hottub, and on the first day it was pretty hard to alternate with freezing showers. That wiped me out for some time.

For dinner, after wandering aimlessly in the driving rain, we looped back to the hotel and took refuge in the very Japanese-looking Italian across the street from our ryokan (great decor). Alex ordered pasta a l’arrabiata (very good), and I a beef soup. The meat was fattier than fatty tuna but the soup was yummy, flavoured and light and springtimey.

Kanazawa is by the sea (well, a few kms in), and by the mountains too. You can see snow-capped peaks in the distance. It’s a lovely feeling: seagulls in the sky, yummy fish in the stalls but a crispness and air that come definitely from the mountains. I should know, I lived 1400m up in the Pyrenees for three years, and it’s the same feeling of purity.

The room was hot all night. Alex loved it, as for me I had to sleep fully dressed over the covers. It’s the only way I was going to stop sweating without getting cold.

The Japanese breakfast downstairs was lovely, with barely a touch of sugar. We had grilled and cold salmon, rice, pickles, glutten thinggies and other lovely stuff.

The sun shone today, and that was a relief. We borrowed the ryokan bikes and cycled to the biggest geisha district, over the river. Due to a slight miscalculation we ended up climbing the whole hill (lovely). In fact the district was at the foot but we got there eventually.

It was nice but a bit too posh and manicured. Great architecture though, and some fine produce which we sampled later back in our room (including a truly brilliant miso-caramelised dried shrimp and sardine and walnut mix).

We cycled back to the hotel along the river through the other, smaller but ‘realer’ geisha area.

After our apéritifs we felt like udon soup and found a restaurant next door. Great looking. Actually, that’s one thing that has struck us in Japan: the awesome tradition of interior design and its transition from traditional to modern in such a seamless way. Everything seems to make sense, is well thought-out, unobstrusive yet beautiful. At a café in the first geisha district we sat by a window whose top was at about my nipples’ height. From where my eyes were all I could see a tray full of white pebbles topped by a ceramic dish full with water and a green pine tree twig. Lovely. Then I thought ‘what a strange idea to have a window so low’, so I bent down and looked. The outdoor space was 1,50m by 2m at most, full of AC motors and ugly wires and all the rest of it. In short, it was nasty. Yet, by cutting a low window and drawing as a result your attention to the white pebbles, the architects allowed natural light in (outdoor space and reflective white stones), zen beauty and clever design. Instead of the ‘let’s have a wall here and stick a strong light’ attitude many people would have in the West, they circumvented the whole problem and turned it into a very impressive selling point.

This kind of realisations seems to happen again and again here. These guys are very very clever at designing. Of course we knew of Japanese architecture. We’ve got coffee table books of it. We’ve watched TV programs about it. But you’ve got to make it here to fully understand. It’s not just a few token architect houses that are amazing: the principles are at play in a lot of common places as well. Materials, dark ceilings with white walls and floors, wood, slats, circles, minimalism with the only decoration being the udon soup bowls (sublime)… Pasta a l’arrabiata on black ceramic plates…

Anyway. After lunch we headed for the samurai district. I thought samurai were the private army of their masters. Bodyguards and police for them. But Wikipedia proved me wrong: at times in Japanese history they were a ruling class unto themselves, they even managed to kick out the emperor at one point. No surprise their houses look so stunning, and the district as pretty as a dream. Now it’s also full of lovely restaurants, including an Irish pub serving ‘real Irish food’ and a Breton one with decent-looking ‘galettes’.

Alex fell in love with yet more bicycles in a shop there. I chatted with three young skateboarders. The smell of bread drew us to a lovely boulangerie.

Hell, Kanazawa is nice. I really like it. It’s got a lot going for it: traditional and cool big avenues. The feel is just right. The central area of Kyoto we visited was a letdown of sorts, whereas here it’s all good, and again so quiet yet so alive. No one in the streets yet all eateries are full. Weird.

Walking down to the river in the south to grab the loop bus back up, Alex found a lovely shop mixing new and antiques with handbags and mobiles and cameras and all the quirkiness of our Japan so far stashed into a neat-looking industrial-Finnish-Edo space. She got a French handbag made in Japan, I a book of B&W film photos of the town. By an American. Who has been living here for 23 years. Beautiful book, beautiful pix: he follows the seasons from autumn to summer and draws a great portrait of the city, in quite a ‘Japanese’ style as well – refined, understated, mixing, discreet.

It’s only been two days in Kanazawa, but I can see why you could stay here for so long (beyond what I’ve already said): winters are tough, piles of snow and frezzing cold (roofs are equipped to deal with that, snow spades are tucked away in garages). Summers are hot. The seasons exist here, not like in, say… Laos? And seasons, I realise now, are important to me. Can’t have too much of only one thing, it kills the pleasure. You need to freeze to enjoy the heat, and vice-versa. The lesson of onsen maybe.

Speaking of which, ours shuts at 11pm. Sayonara.

Last day in Kyototo

Our evening with Dom and Cat was very lovely indeed. We took them to the okonomi yaki (pancake) place we discovered on our first night. The waiter recognised us instantly. I bent my diet and partook in a yasube yaki again. Had a quick self-flagellation afterwards. Bad boy. Baaad.

 

Then Dom dragged us through the emptying streets of historical Kyoto to a place he’d read about online. He described it as a ‘barely-converted garage’ for drinking wine. After a few hesitations and happening upon a scooter-pedestrian crash, we found it. It had nothing of a garage anymore (if it had ever been one), although it was on a small dead residential street. It’s called ‘Chez Quasimodo’, looks very neat from the outside. Inside it’s like a Montmartre cellar: a 10-pax bar, a huge stucco glass cabinet full of all the spirits you can think of, dim lights, a top-of-the-range record player and speakers, a wine fridge, a round-shaped ceiling and a liveried barman, Japanese yet more French-looking than any of us Frogs these days, speaking French (he ‘had fun’ in Bordeaux he said).

 

We ordered a bottle of Côtes de nuit Village which was very nice, and after pouring our glasses the waiter left the bottle in front of us on the bar. Once in a while he’d get cheeses out and slice them just in front of us for other customers (all pairs but us). They smelled like the real deal and had us salivating. But we didn’t take the bait. At other times he’d change the LPs, which he chose from monumental shelves full to the rafters with them. Always with a nice smile on his face. Very attentive but not sticky at all, a master at his trade, retired yet always present when needed, slow darting eyes to his various duty stations. A cool dude.

 

After a long while chatting in pairs (Alex and Dom, Cat and I) due to the bar, we decided to move to spirits. Dom ordered a Talisker, Cat a Macallan, Alex another glass of red, and I a very lovely Cognac which had hints of strawberry, was creamy and quite light with a pink/light colour. Again, the cool dude left our respective bottles in front of us. Great evening. Great coincidence to all be here at the same time.

 

Next day (yesterday), I felt a bit shit. Don’t know if it was because of the drinking or a combo of that and a wee bug. My right calf was hurting quite bad too; that was the walking. The plan was to go into the centre, so we did. The tube system is confusing at the best of times but we got to our destination, having paid a pound each more than we should have apparently. The Kyoto station, we were told, is famous. It was built by a controversial architect in the 90s and was adjuged then to be far too modernist. Frankly, it was very underwhelming. One side has got a huge metal girder-and-glass round structure way up above the atrium. It’s got the monumental on its side but it’s disconnected from everything, looks badly aged and useless. In a way it’s like a messed-up trial version of the King’s Cross station roof that was built uncomfortably high so that people didn’t have to see it if they didn’t want to.

 

Another famous part of the design is the 25-metre wide steps going up to the roof, from where you can enjoy city views from behind glasspanes. Yeah. Right. Woohoo, 25-metre wide steps. Personally, I’d stick the whole thing in the ‘missed opportunity’ section of 20th century architecture. But anyway.

 

Under the station is a huge maze of shops and exits that you can never reach and signs leading to nowhere. Still we managed to escape after kafkaing our way out and headed for the best shopping plaza, said the guide. The Avanti plaza. It was plain rubbish. After a minute we got out and it was time to eat. Desperately we looked for a restaurant in the streets that took our fancy… And ended up in another plaza, way up in the food court. We hadn’t planned to but settled for a pizza. It is said that Japan is good at foreign food so we gave it a go, and it was actually pretty good.

 

After that we took the escalator down. The plan was to get back to where Chez Quasimodo was for Alex had spotted nice shops in the area. But we never made it. We stopped at Uniqlo on the floor below the food court. Then the outdoor clothing shop. Then the bicycle section (for electric bikes), and the electronics floor to finish with (and finish us off). We were quite disappointed by the looks of these malls: low-ceilinged, very messy, gaudy (says Alex). Personally, I was expecting something more akin to classy Bangkok shopping malls but so far, nope.

 

(before I forget, since I’m writing this on the train to Kanazawa: Japanese trains are WAY TOO hot. I’m wearing a tee-shirt now and still I’m sweating. It’s unbearable. Reminds me of Czech and Slovak trains and buildings)

 

However, it must be said that they are very well stocked, and we bough a few things, messed up our tube journey back and crawled to the hotel. Had a bath straight away again to ease the painful and heavy legs. We could have gone to a traditional show. Should have. But didn’t. Just lifting my eyelid was exhausting. After a shot of acid (JOKE – ndf), I did manage to drag myself out for diner. We walked through another red light district by a nice canal, found an udon counter restaurant and slurped the goodies.

 

Then it was curtains.

Kyototo day 2

The calves are not responding well to all this walking. Stretching session this late afternoon and I’m still feeling pretty stiff.

Last night we wandered in the banana district of town, which is a euphemism for a male thing that sometimes looks like the fruit. Nothing was on show so Alex got a bit disappointed. But we found a counter restaurant for a maximum of six, and ate there. The guy was real nice, jokey and eager to please, like most people we’ve come across so far (this evening in the train 2 women followed us on the wrong line for them thinking we’d made a mistake – we hadn’t, so that got off and turned round). It was just us and him, he knew five food words in English and us nothing in Japanese but we got by. He talked about beefoo and his wifoo.

I had pickles and cabbage salad, Alex tempura veggies and SHRIMP, which she ate like a big girl. Besides, she didn’t die, so there may be an opening here.

We got home, read for 10 minutes and fell asleep like logs of Lao frangipani tree. Amazing how well we’re sleeping here: the cold air, the walking, the opaque curtains, the silent streets, all these combine to give us a rest like we haven’t had in over a year. Still, we’re knackered.

Today was cultural day as we headed for Ryoanji and the golden temple. I’ve known about the former for years. It started when I got into architecture all the way back, and cropped up again when I worked on my PhD thesis as John Cage was deeply influenced by it. He even wrote pieces with this title.

Well, I was a bit underwhelmed really. It’s a single walled garden 25m x 10m. You sit, think profound things, walk around the house and leave. It was nice, don’t misunderstand me, but not as impressive as I thought it would be. The landscape gardens around the shrine are very pretty. We walked around the lake twice and ended up eating at the shrine’s restaurant, a VERY traditional place in its own big Japanese garden. The tables were 30cm high, you sat on flat cushions on the tatamis. There’s glass openings at the bottom of the sliding doors, which become rice-paper after 60cm or so. It’s very uncomfortable for us, but it feels like you’re a samurai of sorts, and it’s cool. Food was expensive but original and pretty good. One more tick on our list. The knees and back won’t withstand a lot more of those tortures.

Then we walked to Kinkaku-ji, the golden temple. Yeah… Same feeling as previously: not flooded with gasping awe. Nice yes, but you see it and you think ‘ok, what next?’. It’s a lovely pavilion whose 2nd and 3rd floors are all golden (inside and out), so it looks pretty spectacular what with the wooden hill backdrop and lake and what have you. But that’s it. And you can’t go in. So you follow the crowd, most of which seems to be made up of Chinese groups, along the narrow path which takes you round the back and up the hillock to exit by drink-vending machines and ice-cream stalls.

What was much more interesting we thought was our walking through the locals streets to go from the train stations to the temples and vice-versa. Very endearing. Extremely quiet, again, but far from dead: there’s all the life you want there, it just goes on as if no one wanted to awaken a nearby monster. Lots of houses, even shabby ones, seem to have a garden of sorts, with Japanese pine trees most likely. The atmosphere is just right, just lovely. No one laughs at you for being a foreigner (a Chinese kid on the train did have to point out to her parents ‘waiguoren’ as she looked at me; when I replied ‘ni ye shi waiguoren’, which means ‘you too are a foreigner’, she clammed up).

Yep, we like it.

The bikes and motorbikes don’t appear to be secured. Looks weird, wrong and wonderful. I saw a few big bikes on the road today: Hayabusas, Super Fours and ZZ1400s. All Japanese. I’m still to spot a non Jap bike.

One of the questions that we had before arriving was ‘how long before we beg for non Japanese food?’. So far we’re still happily eating away at the local cuisine, which is very varied and subtle and delicious. Breakfast at the hotel is a dream.

Speaking of which, it’s nearly time to meet up with Dom and Kat on the bridge over the river Kamo. I have a feeling I’m going to zap and gobble up one of those scrumptious pancakes. I know I’m bad. Bad boy.

 

 

First steps, first impressions

Impressed, that’s the first impression.

Coming to Kyoto may have given us a misrepresenting image of Japan, but here it’s deliciously nice. Most striking of all is how quiet and silent things are compared to any Asian place of similar attraction. In China, places like Kyoto were a nightmarish rave party with conflicting musics on speakers, tourist guides on megaphones, lasers, and a lot of kitsch.

Kyoto is serene, calm, beautiful in a small and wooden way. The sun is shining and we’re getting more sunburns here than in Laos, even though it’s a good 20 degrees less.

Tradition seems big here, but not AGAINST the new, not as a show either, just because. There’s quite a lot of women walking around in geisha-like kimonos, some men in kimonos. Most eateries are your typical cliché: curtains, bamboo slats, wood, plants, gravel. Some are very surprising: cliché then get in and you’ve got any kind of atmosphere you want. Yesterday we ended up in a bohemian-jazzy cocktail bar playing all sorts of reggae (it’d have been jazz and blues in Europe no doubt). There was no list, you just gave the name of a drink and they cocktailed it for you. Alex had a very nice mojito, I a tequila sunrise (in the land of the rising sun, what else really?).

Today, we had lunch in a first cliched restaurant which was so 70s inside it was confusing.

Then we had dessert (mochi, naturally – I had about 10 yesterday) in a tiny tiny thing of a room which had a mochi display, 5 or 6 aquariums and handmade kaleidoscope. Just like in mantas and films, Japan seems to mix things in a way that we can’t or won’t mix things – and they make it look very cool indeed. As if there was no overarching notion of what goes with what. Of course there must be, but as it is we don’t know it and so much the better. She then insisted that we had the mochi there and then in her microscopic shop and gave us genmai tea (at 5 when we went for macha near the orange gate shrine we were also given free hoji tea at the end – won’t complain).

After the cocktail last night we ate in a Japanese pancake eatery. It was beyond BRILLIANT. Very nice atmosphere too, more traditional with the hotplate and the cook, then your own hotplate and the orders fizzing past, the clouds of steam above the cook, she rushing around all the time for this or that ingredient, popping out from behind the hotplate to tell you the loo is busy and will you please wait.

Today we heard a guy who laughed like in a manga. So they exist!

We spent the afternoon walking in and around Fushimi Inari shrine, aka the orange-gate walkway: hundreds of orange gates often near-touching each other helping your way along the path to the top of the hill. The path snakes through forests of pine and bamboo trees and stops several times at various shrines, full as well of orange and stone gates ranging from tiny to quite substantial. And there’s always stone dogs guarding them.

So far so very very nice. Peaceful despite the crowd, peaceful when there’s no one, but never the impression that it’s dead. It’s alive and very well and yet it’s quiet, tranquil, soothing.

We’re knackered from all the walking, activity which we haven’t done since we’re in Laos. But it’s lovely, crisp and sunny during the day, very chilly in the evening.

Turns out we’re having dinner tomorrow with Dom and Kat, two colleagues of Alex now posted in Beijing. Alex was a  deskmate of Dom pre-2007, and he saw from FB we were in Kyoto. How funny innit!

PS: nearly forgot the two bad points – the automatically heated toilet seat and the wall so close to the loo I have to do the splits to wipe me bum.

JAPAN

Gooday. Or should I say ‘Konichua’?

This evening we’re flying off to Japan. Alex will be able to rest, hopefully, after a number of tough weeks at work. It had always been her idea to go. In China already, but it had never materialised. This time it has and I’m looking forward to it.

It’s been a while since I’ve had that feeling: not knowing what to expect. I know it’s ‘different’, I know most stereotypes and have a lot of images in my head. But what’s so nice about this trip is the uncertainty as to what we will actually discover there. How much will the clichés be true? What will stand out in the end? Japan is sure to mess up with what I think it’ll be, and that’s a lovely feeling.

Besides it’ll be spring, with mixed temperatures. In the Japanese Alps, it’ll even be cold. Snow-capped peaks and all that. I realised yesterday that since September-October 2012 I haven’t had any of that, and it’s been missed. Going under the blanket in a rush because the air in the room is chilly. Feeling the gentle bite of a cold breeze on your skin. Wrapping up warm in a coat, a woollen scarf.

Japan, here we come.