Kanazawa

Today was another big day! It was also a gorgeous day- sunny and clear and probably our warmest day yet in Japan. We hopped on the bullet train shortly before 9am and went south through the mountains to Kanazawa. Our first stop there was the morning market which was just starting to get busy. We bought some fresh fruit and perused through the shops to see all the weird fish and sea creatures that were for sale. I saw some samples of what looked like pieces of ice cream cones so I decided to try it but it turned out to be some sort of fish cracker. Yuck! It reminded me of the time I accidentally drank my dad's vinegar water thinking it was going to be apple juice. Double gross. Don't ask me why my parent's used to drink vinegar water- they're nuts.

Here's a picture while on the train, we saw some incredible mountain views but it always went by so quickly because we would enter another tunnel that it was tough to get a picture.

After the market we went to the geisha district. We roamed through the tiny streets and peered in the tiny shops but we never did see a geisha. We did find a tea shop though, where we took our shoes off and sat on tiny mats to have some (very strong) green tea and try a Japanese cake, which I think is made of bean paste. I wasn't too fond of the cake myself- I prefer a normal chocolate sheet cake with blue frosting. But it was an experience.

Then we walked to the Kanazawa castle grounds. We strolled through the gardens first which were huge. Then we went into the castle, which wasn't very castle-y. The interior was mostly wood and they had pictures and videos of the different joints that were used, which was really interesting. We toured through the three floors but it was pretty bare except for some displays which were mostly in Japanese. At the end they had some wooden blocks that had been cut to be examples of the different joints so you could pull them apart and put them back together, similar to jigsaw puzzles. It was so cool to see how they fit together and how strong they were.

Here are some pictures of the castle and the grounds:

Then we had a short walk over to the Kenroku-en Garden, which is one of the three great gardens of Japan. The garden used to form the outer garden of the castle. It was a beautiful garden! It was full of old majestic trees and ponds and twisting waterways. It is also full of old structures and statues that are full of history. There was a tea house there that was built in 1774, and apparently the oldest water fountain in Japan was there operating under natural water pressure. One weird thing was that most of the trees there had a ton of supports holding up the branches; some of them seemed almost like there were more supports than there was tree.

We decided to get a snack after the garden and we kept seeing these gold ice cream cones so we opted to try one of those. Most of them were completely covered in gold but we got one with gold flakes for half the cost. It was still weird, although I couldn't taste anything different about it. Then Matt broke the cone part way through and splattered ice cream all over us. :) Matt was very passionate about how this went down; he believes it was the fault of the lack of strength of the cone and that it happened before he ever bit down and he really wanted me to believe that too. I maintain that it happened when he bit down on it in a foolish way. We may never know the truth to this mystery.

Here's the cone pre-Matt :) (unfortunately I don't have an after shot)

After the ice cream fiasco we walked to the "Ninja Temple" which we discovered wasn't actually a place for ninjas and really had nothing to do with ninjas at all, but rather it's a nickname. It's real name is Myoryu-ji and commonly known as Ninja-dera because of it's many deceptive defenses. Turns out we needed to pre-book tours so we weren't able to go inside, but we read the information outside and it sounded pretty cool. It's a Buddhist temple and apparently it has lots of hidden passageways, secret rooms, traps, and escape pits for security reasons.

Then we went to check out a samurai house: the Nomura residence. The Nomura family was one of the most powerful families in Kanazawa in the Edo period (1603-1868). They were samurais. The classic Japanese architecture of the house was incredible and it also had the most gorgeous little garden, which is said to be one of the most well-loved gardens in Japan. They also had different samurai artifacts on display but we couldn't read most of the information about them.

That was our last stop for the day; we took the train back to Nagano and ate dinner in the shopping center attached to our hotel. We walked a ton today so we're pretty tired.

I had to create a new google photo album since google will only allow me to put 2000 pictures in a single album. I linked the new one on the right, directly above the link to the old one. That's where I'll be adding my daily photos from now on, but you can still see all of the old ones prior to today in the original one.