Kanazawa

We’re so grateful to have had friends and family meet us at various points during our travels. It was great fun to meet up with our friend, Rowena, in this fantastic part of Japan.
A second typhoon made for some unpredictable weather, but we were lucky that it didn’t disrupt our enjoyment of this wonderful city and it’s surrounds. Both of us wished we’d been stationed in Kanazawa when we lived here as it seems the perfectly sized city that has all the modern conveniences, but also beautifully preserved historic sites, green spaces, and is also near the ocean and mountains.
To more easily visit the Noto Penninsula, we rented a car and were able to enjoy some stunning coastal scenery and a surprisingly good French meal in the small coastal town of Wajima.
On another day, we drove to the UNESCO World Heritage villages of Gokayama and Suganuma - famous for their well-preserved Gassho-style houses with “praying hands”-shaped, thatched roofs.
The remainder of our time, we walked through the samurai and geisha districts, the castle grounds, and incredible garden of Kenroku-en, and through the busy food market – making sure to stop and eat many delicious foods along the way.
Rowena loves Japanese sweets (wagashi) as much as we do, so we took a class on how to create some decorative red and white bean treats. Our results were pretty amazing, if we do say so ourselves. Yum!
We also managed to have a very amusing experience at a reflexology “spa”, where staff were confused by Rowena being Asian, but not speaking Japanese or Chinese, and Christy quickly learned to tell the therapist in Japanese not to poke her feet so hard. Ouch!
Special thanks to Rowena (and Marc’s phone) for (temporarily) improving the quality of our blog photos.Read more