Today was the first of our day excursions out of Tokyo. In doing a bunch of research over the course of several months’ preparation for this trip I found a city named Kanazawa which had several key interest points that seemed different from Tokyo. It is a city but not remotely the size of Tokyo. There is a reconstructed castle as well as a very large landscape garden. In any event, the place seemed interesting to me so when I presented it to everyone else they said sure.
I personally am glad they did. I liked Kanazawa a lot. The day started early with a trip to Tokyo Station by cab where we tried to get on the 6:32am train to Echigo-Yuzawa. Actually we had initially reserved seats for the 7:00am run but the ticket person said we could take the 6:33 instead. Since we were worried about how difficult it would be to get to the changeover train at Echigo-Yuzawa we thought it would be better to take the earlier train. The girl told us the train was at track 20 and we didn’t have a ton of time to get there but if we had any idea where it was it would have been enough. After circling the JR station about 3 or 4 times Brien spotted track 20. It was 6:33am. After this we ran back down to a ticket window and were able to exchange our reservations back to 7:00am with little issue. It moved over a couple tracks to number 22 but since we knew where to go we were able to get on the train with no issue. From there we reached Echigo-Yuzawa at 8:12am and had to get to our exchange train at 8:20. Fortunately their train station was very tiny and it was literally run upstairs and get on the train that was just arriving. It took us 3 minutes to achieve this task and we had 5 to spare before it departed. The JR system is very much on time. The remaining train ride was long but we saw a lot of spectacular scenery that doesn’t particularly photograph well from a moving train but we tried some anyway. There were a lot of underground stretches but it was basically a fun ride minus the spots of heat when the sun was pouring into the windows.
Let me preface the bit about Kanazawa with one short bit. Not long after we got off the train and started walking our way towards the main area we noticed on the sides of the roads in the bushes that were used for decoration that there were some giant spider webs hanging amongst the branches and sometimes attached also to structures in the area. On these webs were giant yellow or green and black spiders that were basically big enough to take a small child without a fight and could probably win against a prize fighter all the same. They were all over Kanazawa and I can only assume that they exude some sort of chemical that keeps the locals from seeing them. We obviously weren’t there long enough so they were in plain sight to us. In telling the story Scott had nightmares about spiders when we got back.
We arrived at Kanazawa at 10:53 and immediately went to the ticket office and purchased our return tickets. We then explored the mall-like train station for a few minutes and then exited to look for some food and the touristy spots in the city. It is not a particularly large city and it doesn’t appear to be geared towards night life but it is a cultural city so there was a lot to see. We walked up the main way and found the local market which was like a miniature version of the Tsukiji Fish Market. This market was called the Omi-cho Market. In there we found a yaki-tori stand and we all bought a stick and enjoyed them very much. Brien even went back and bought seconds. I am pretty sure Brien was thinking something along the lines of, “Oh no, not the fish market again,” but we didn’t stay long so it wasn’t so bad for him.
From there we found Kanazawa Castle which is a reconstruction of a castle that has burned down 4 times. It was really interesting to go through it. They had little informational stalls that spoke in English if you pressed the right button. We spent a fair amount of time navigating the inside of the castle and we even had a Japanese woman suggest someone should kick Scott down the treacherously steep stairs of the tower turrets.
After the Castle we headed for the Kenrokuen Garden and spent the better part of our time in the city there. It was a Japanese landscape garden that had a ton of beautiful little scenes as well as a tea house where we tried our hands at a tea ceremony. There was a pond with giant coy fish as well as a waterfall and there was a small temple and samurai house which appeared to be closed for some sort of renovations. In any event to make sure we could make it back to the train station in time we headed back after finding the samurai house and got back to the main strip with a fair amount of time to spare. Our path did give us a view of several really neat houses though and I got pictures of a bunch of them.
Since we had time I suggested we try to grab dinner from the Freshness Burger near the market and everyone agreed to try it. It’s sort of like a McDonald’s but not so gross. They had a bunch of versions of burgers and I tried the salsa burger which was mildly spicy. I enjoyed it a lot thought they put a ton of lettuce on it. I removed some but ate it with lettuce though I usually don’t. It was very good and their fries were like steak fries which also were very good. The cashier and the cook were both dressed in costume for Halloween and the place was also decorated for said reason. I got a picture of the two workers before we left.
After Freshness Burger we walked back to the train station where we ran around the mall for a while and bought some knickknacks and four of something that was like a Twinky with chilled flavored creams from a specialty shop. They were really good. I had a café latte version. Two had chocolate and one had vanilla. I forgot to take a pic before I ate it but perhaps the half eaten shot will give a better idea of what it was like. We ate them on the train back. We again had little trouble with the connection even though there was only an 8 minute window to switch at Echigo-yuzawa. I fell asleep for a few minutes on the first train even though I had my contacts in. Fortunately they rehydrated by the time we got back to Tokyo. It was a long day for us as we weren’t back to the Hotel until basically 11:20pm or so. All the same though I would definitely visit Kanazawa again even in a single day trip though when I come back to Japan in the future I would like to dedicate a couple days to it.
A short note on the train system. The shinkansen were very clean and since we bought green car rail passes we are using first class seats which are big even by gaijin standards. They are bigger than business class seats on the Acela in the states. While some of the trains were obviously older they still had marquees that had English every so often so we could tell what stop we were at even if I couldn’t pick out the information from the announcements and the Tokyo run train also had English loudspeaker announcements as well. The Echigo-yuzawa to Kanazawa trip unfortunately had smoking cars. Though the green car was non-smoking there were times when someone opened the doors and it would cycle into our car for a few minutes from the other cars since the air seems to be recycled within sort of like an airplane. Our other trips should not include any sort of train exchanges though and hopefully will be fully smoke free trains.
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