Gardens, a castle, and so much seafood

We were up early this morning and had a quick konbini breakfast (Brad went all the way to the 7-11 to find shrimp onigiri for me!) before setting off to Kenroku-en gardens. On the way there, we ended up going through the grounds for Oyama Shrine, which was this peaceful, green paradise just a block away from the current city center. We tried not to get too distracted (it's hard here!) and get to the gardens quickly and while it was still "cool."

Kenroku-en is considered one of the three most beautiful gardens in all of Japan, and for good reason! It is absolutely huge, thoughtfully planned, and just a pleasure to wander through. There are many water features with running water as well as a fountain that is naturally powered. The pictures will likely not do it justice, but nonetheless, we enjoyed our time there and appreciated how green everything is!

Then, we were off to Kanazawa Castle. The original castle burned down in 1602 as they made everything out of wood. There has been a huge effort to do restoration work after it was declared a national historic site in 2008. You can still go into the storehouse and see the huge cypress beams, the expert carpentry, and the details such as the "stone dropping windows" which allowed soldiers to drop stones on enemies trying to climb the walls!

It was getting even hotter, so we decided to head over to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. As it is Sunday, the Museum was busy, but it was also great to see so many families there to see contemporary art! We stopped into the cafe to grab some iced lattes and slice of strawberry cream cake before moving on to the galleries. We got tickets to the special exhibitions and enjoyed seeing a lot of pieces that are hard to explain in writing. I'm hopeful that some of the pictures will do the talking instead.

After seeing the galleries, we took the bus, as Kanazawa is a bus city as opposed to a subway or metro city, to the fish market to grab lunch. Japan has been dangerous for us as we love to eat and try new things. The food is so good (and safe to eat) everywhere that we get distracted constantly and want to try a million things! There were many fish vendors just selling things like oysters, shrimp, etc that you eat while standing at their booths. We came across a craft beer stand and stopped to have a sample. The beer is from Toyama, which is the stop on the bullet train before Kanazawa. It was very enjoyable! Gold is a big thing here in Kanazawa, so you could also get your beer covered in gold flake. While we didn't partake, several other people did!

We wound our way through the food stalls and looked at everything in awe. We stopped and had a small octopus, seaweed, and cucumber salad in the market before finally decided to sit down at a restaurant and eat bowls of rice topped with seafood. The shrimp is served raw here and is very different than the shrimp we are familiar with. Crab is also big here, so we had some sweet red crab, which was excellent. We also got to try "salt" cider. Cider is a soft drink, not an alcoholic beverage here. They add salt to the soft drink, so it tastes lightly of salt, but is also a bit sweet. I'm sure it'll help replace all our electrolytes as we've been sweating so much!

It was time to cool down, so we headed back to our hotel for some AC and respite.

We freshened up and went for our last happy hour here. Then, it was another bus adventure to get to dinner. Luckily, we managed to get on the right bus… or a bus that was going where we needed to go anyway!

Dinner tonight was at JinJin and we preordered the eight course nigiri menu. Nigiri is hand-shaped sushi rice with fish/seafood (usually raw) on top. We both started with Japanese gin cocktails. We were brought a steamed egg custard and miso soup to start. We added on a dish of boiled octopus (it tasted like the ocean!) before diving into our eight pieces of nigiri. I can’t remember all the names, but I do know that we had white shrimp, sweet shrimp, squid, pressed trout, mackerel, and the house special which was fried horse mackerel. Everything was beyond delicious and we were very happy!

We walked back to our hotel, but made a pit stop at Family Mart to buy the Insta-famous frozen creme brûlée. It’s famous for a good reason!

Tomorrow we head just outside Kanazawa to our ryoken!Read more