24 October 2016
Castles gardens and tourists
Travelling to Kanazawa and the Kenrokuen garden
Kanazawa has the same population as Toyama, and yet it seems 10 times bigger.
It is sometimes referred to as little Kyoto, as a result, there are tourists everywhere.
The train ride was all of 30 minutes, and there was actually a view to enjoy for at least half the journey, a first for Japan!
The weather is also fantastic, I am wearing my shorts with pride. I originally wanted to spend 4 days here instead of 2, Toyama was added on because I could not get any accommodation in Kanazawa over the weekend. I think its where everyone in Nagano and Toyama went.
There are also westerners everywhere. Kyoto levels of white people. All flocking to the castles and gardens. I decided to do the same as I was too early to check into my hotel.
Somehow I took a lot of pictures this morning, oh well. Prepare for scrolling. Pro tip - page down is faster if you just want to skip to the end and tell me you looked / read my nonsense.
I got up early and did my washing. It was not fully dried. It was then transported damp in my suitcase, and is now drying in my huge hotel room in Kanazawa.
As I said, the weather was fantastic. Heres a main street in Toyama whilst I paced about waiting for my washing to catch fire or shrink down to doll size. It looks like theres been a zombie apocalypse.
Toyama is really proud of being compact. Every bus and tram says COMPACT CITY on the side. A strange thing to brag about. Like bragging about your superior quality of potassium.
I am no marriage expert, but I believe in Australia if you describe a wedding as being beige, its an insult.
I found a bonus Toyama temple whilst waiting for a coffee shop to open (8am is the earliest any open, on a work day!) and also waiting for my washing still.
I think its brand new, parts of it are under construction. So compact.
Some of the streets are nice with trees and colored man hole covers and birds making a strange mechanical noise.
Before getting on my bullet train I had a small sandwich with buttered lightly toasted bread. Not bad. Could do without the mystery creams.
View from the bullet train!
Kanazawa station is very impressive. The city has 3 centres, this isnt even one of them, yet its still very busy and colorful around the station. The traditional gate is made of recycled plastic.
This is my hotel. ANA Holiday Inn Sky Plaza. It looks old and tired from the outside. Its the biggest hotel in the city by a considerable margin, and obviously due to its name, popular with foreigners. But its also cheap.
And what a fantastic view from my room!
More view.
Over the road from my hotel is a huge market. With people! Pay attention Nagano and Toyama, people in covered shopping streets!
There is a whole grid of them including food markets, and its packed out at lunch time on a Monday. My photo is from a less busy corner.
There were even restaurants with long lines of people wanting to line up for their lunch.
Due to the excellent weather, I pushed on to the castle ruins and replacement castle.
The grounds had nice formal gardens to appreciate, for free.
This is all the castle there is to see, you have to pay to go in, I didnt. Its not the actual castle, that was destroyed to prevent samurais from taking over again.
This is the storage shed for the demolished castle. Presumably where they kept ladders and gardening equipment to keep the samurai master pleased.
Now I went over the road to the main attraction of this city, the Kenrokuen gardens. This guy is taking it seriously.
Where as these old men are sweeping mud for some reason. Its 310 yen to get in to see mud sweepers.
It was nice enough I suppose. But I dont think it warrants the amount of tourist hysteria it gets. I have seen nicer free gardens on the side of the road in other places.
Nice lake, I have done well to hide the thousands of tourists. Again they all seem to be Japanese tour groups. Westerners generally are showing themselves around. I saw no Chinese at all, unless I cant recognise them and their tourmaster was barking at them on the loud speaker in Japanese.
I presume when every sentence the tour herder is screaming ends in arigato gozaimasu they are screaming at Japanese people. But I could be wrong.
Japanese people like to play dress up to come to the garden. I took this sneaky creep shot.
Then I took an even more disturbing photo.
Theres a few streams and trees, but really its nowhere near the spectacle of the Suzhou gardens in China.
Outside there is a row of ice cream shops.
This is a high school memorial museum. What? I dont know either. To the right is the castle remains.
I dont know whats been going on here, or is about to happen, but they need about 1000 portable toilets. Japanese metamucil speed eating championships.
One of 3 city centres. The whole place looks very nice.
And my hotel room not only has views, its huge.
Last photo for now. Kind of wish I had more time in Kanazawa. Glad I went to the gardens and castle today as to me its not worth a full day of my time.
I have other plans for my day tomorrow....weather depending! Rain is forecast.