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.
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