Kanazawa and Home

May 28, 2009

August 16 and 17, 2008

We took a bus from Ainokura and a train to our final destination of Kanazawa. Kanazawa is about the same size as Himeji and located along the Sea of Japan coast. During WWII the city was not bombed, so its historical and cultural sites are well-preserved. We only had one night in Kanazawa but I felt like we could have stayed there for a few more nights as well.

Check out this cool tori gate at the train station. The picture on the left is from my friend, Lauren, who also visited Kanazawa in the fall. I borrowed a few pictures from her and my friend, Richard, because I didn't take that many photos of the city.

We wandered around the city and visited the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. We were lucky to stumble upon a Ron Mueck art show at the museum. He is an Australian artist, who use to work for the film industry. " His sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images." Please check out his work. It's really interesting.

Also in the museum is this unusual swimming pool.

As we were hanging out at a cafe, we saw these girls walking around.

The next day, we headed to Kanazawa's famous garden, Kenroku-en. It is deemed as one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan (the other two are Kairuaku-en in Mito and Koraku-en in Okayama).

From there we had to make our way home by train. It was a long 8 hour train ride because we took local trains due to the special fares available during that time. Not quite ready to go home yet, we decided to make a quick stop in Osaka to meet our friends, Richard and Kimi for dinner.

They took us to an all you can eat kushi-katsu restaurant. You can choose lots of meats and vegetables on a stick along with side dishes, dessert and drinks.

You bring the sticks to your table and batter them and fry them in the center of the table. It was fun!

I don't have any good pictures of Richard and Kimi, so I won't post them. It was a really nice ending to our trip. We headed back to Himeji from there.

My favorite places were the most remote and beautiful locations such as Kamikochi, the Nakasendo Road and Ainokura. Also, after successfully camping in Kamikochi, we decided that we wanted to start buying our own equipment and try to camp in other locations.