Shirakawa-go

Took a bus from Kanazawa to Takayama. The bus travels through the mountains and makes a brief rest stop at Shirakawa-go. Shirakawa-go's traditional grass roofed buildings are heritage listed. It was raining on this bus trip and it seemed to get heavier when we got out for this stop. Not a lot to see and do at this time of year, looks like a better winter destination, certainly not much we could do in the 15 minutes we had, so just grabbed a postcard book, looked at a few model before splashing our way back to the bus.




Bus into shirakawa-go, gifu


Key Song: Spring Rain by The Go-Betweens

Kanazawa - Day 1

Took the train from Osaka to Kanazawa. Beautiful scenery along the way; mountains, lake, smallish settlement squeezed into every valley, and snow still melting on the mountainside.

Kanazawa is set up well for tourists. If you center yourself near the main rail station, (many hotels surrounding it), everything is withing easy reach. A tourist loop bus route, runs every 15 minutes and it stops near nearly all the towns main attractions. Only 500 yen for a day of unlimited use.

The first place most people go to is the gardens and castle, you can easily spend half a day just on these two locations. On the we were there the gardens were open for free. In general you can assume the cost of entering a garden or castle in Japan is somewhere between 300 and 600 yen, add little extra if they provide a guided tour. The Kenrokuen gardens are large strolling gardens, every turn offering a new vista. Official Site

Seiyu & Oko-nomi-yaki

Feeling a little jet lagged. Went up the road to the local Seiyu supermarket, which is now open 24 hours, to buy the things I didn't pack (saving luggage space & weight) such as shampoo, conditioner. They have a nice collection of Pocky products, so I grabbed some "mens pocky". Pocky is a Japanese snack food, which is basically long straight pretzels covered in chocolate, they are suprisingly morish. other flavours are available such as banana flavoured "desert" pocky, the Mens pocky has dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate.




Walked around the local park, a smallish dirt area surrounding the baseball enclosure. It looks much nicer now with the cherry blossoms out.

Back to the appartment for a nap, before going out to den-den town (giant electronics shopping precinct), basically a shopping area for geeks. Lots of gadgets and hobby & model shops. Looking for Gigantor figurines for Gillian, we found a 6ft tall model of him in a shop, and took the obligatory photos. (ask permission before doing this, not all places welcome this kind of behaviour in their stores)

Found a really good boardgame shop called "Yellow Submarine" they had a good collection of Euro games (German editions) with Japanese rule translations included. Found "Modern Art" game cheap, so picked it up also convinced Bob to buy Carcassonne. Carcassonne has got a lot of play in the spare time waiting for shops to open ... in Japan most shops don't open until 10:30am, and I am still waking up at first light 6am.

Yukiko met us in town and we went to an Oko-nomi-yaki restaurant. Oko-nomi-yaki, basically "how you like it", a versitile cabbage pancake, which has as many optional inclusions as pizza. The basic is cabbage, flour, egg, water, red ginger and sliced meat (thinly sliced pork or seafood). They are very delicious, filling and (relatively) cheap, in this restaurant, the center of the table is the hotplate, and the pancake is kept warm on it while you eat it. I have been to another place where it is cooked on the hotplate at front of you. Extremely delicious.

Got back and booked accomodation for our Kanazawa and Takayama trip next week. 3500 to 5500 a night per person (no extra for single rooms vs twin share)