When I got back from Tokyo I went pretty well straight from the station to my class so was somewhat peckish after my lesson and went directly to a yakitori restaurant in this charming little street.  Although it's only a stone's throw from the language school I'd never been in it before.  The little stream is I believe the gentrified remains of the river that was once used to bring merchandise and people from Kanazawa port to the castle.

Yakitori are the kebab like things at the top of the picture and the mat under my plate illustrates the huge variety available from chicken's neck to pig's foot.  As you see they also serve chips which are good to fill up on and easy to handle with chopsticks.

The following day I took a trip into the mountains to the village of Shirakawa-go.  That's it behind me.  It's a Unesco World Heritage site because of the historic architecture of its houses, or of most of them.  They have steeply pitched thatched roofs as you can see in the couple of pictures below.

In the tourist literature it's at its most picturesque in winter when it's metres deep in snow.  For an afternoon's visit that's probably better than the persistent drizzle I experienced but not to live in I'm sure.

The one bright spot about the rain was that it gave me the opportunity to use Kanazawa's brolly sharing system as I mentioned in an earlier post.

Did I also mention that Keita my AirB&B man is a saxophonist?  He was excited to hear that I was too.  It was clearly evidence of an affinity.  We went out to dinner together again in my last week.  This time with a friend of his who was visiting from Kumamoto which is quite far away to the south.  She is also in the AirB&B business but on a larger scale.

As chance would have it we went to a yakitori restaurant so I had that experience twice that week.  This one was in Higashi-Chaya which is one of the historic areas of Kanazawa.  Kasumi was appropriately dressed in a kimono.

In that last picture she's showing me photos of the devastation her house suffered in an earthquake in 2016.  270 people were killed in that earthquake, the thought of which might put me off visiting her next time I'm in Japan.

I've reached a stage in life when I'm quite happy to go home after dinner out but Keita likes to keep the evening going so we went to a bar in the same neck of the woods.  This was a take off your shoes and sit on the floor type of place but with a very comforting twist.  We sat at the counter where we were able to dangle our legs into, as it were, a heated trench.  Very welcome on a chilly evening.

The barman had been to Edinburgh and proudly showed me pictures of the Royal Mile on his phone.  I drank plum wine which I'd previously tasted when I went to a sake place in Nagano.  It's sweet and yummy.  The yakitori place doesn't handle puddings so this was just the thing.

Kanazawa is a seaport but doesn't seem to be as closely linked to the port as Edinburgh is to Leith.  It is a bit further away from the city centre but in four weeks I'd never been there so on my penultimate day I got a bus to the cruise terminal.  This is a very new building.  It opened in 2020 and I'm told the cruise business has grown multifold since then.  The Queen Elizabeth called a couple of days before my visit to the port with 1700 or so passengers.

The more modest Heritage Adventurer with around 140 passengers was there when I went down.

The terminal itself is a pretty striking building and just like Ocean Terminal you can have a nice cup of coffee while watching the boats.

I then took a long walk around and about that included an unsuccessful attempt to visit a museum of mid to late 19th century mechanical dolls.  I arrived too late for the last entry before it closed.  Finally with the help of Google, notwithstanding my occasional stupidity, I got a bus back to town.

The following day was my last day in Japan.  I packed fairly effortlessly after breakfast and then set out with the intention of spending time in the Kenrokuen gardens and in the castle grounds.  In the event I wandered around the gardens till getting on for lunchtime and had no time for the castle.  The gardens are so lovely.  Over the weeks I've taken dozens of photographs but none of them really do the place justice.  Here are a couple taken on my last day.

Looking out from the garden over the city to the mountains

Now came the question of lunch.  I first thought I'd go back to the Jazz Spot Bokunen for a curry and some music but then I remembered the Grill Otsuka and the delicious smells that emanate from it. I'd been thwarted one way or another on the occasions I'd planned to try it. So I headed for it only to be thwarted again by the length of the queue or perhaps by my reluctance to hang about and find one dish after another struck from the menu as I had seen before.

I decided to try a place not far off that I'd enjoyed before.  Blow me, it was closed and this at lunchtime on a Friday and on the eve of the Golden Week holiday when the town was stowed out with visitors.  It doesn't make sense.

Well I cast around and found a delightful little place where I had a super lunch and a beer for about £7.

After lunch was my final class.

Teacher and pupil

 

Keita had offered to take me to the airport, something away above my expectations of an AirB&B host.  It seemed to me that he totally subscribed to what I believe was, or at least was said to be, its original ethos.  Not principally a business but a way of sharing experiences and making friends with strangers.

We set off with his chums Yuki and Masahito.  That turned out not to be as odd as I first thought.  Masahito is a wheelchair user which gave us a prime parking spot immediately outside the terminal building.

We stopped at a couple of beauty spots on the way, Keita being ever keen to show visitors the local treasures.  Personally I really just wanted to get there, go through security and wait for the flight.  I think he was a little disappointed by that and I'm sorry because he's a very nice guy and went out of his way to befriend me.

I got to Tokyo with not a lot of time for the transfer to my Helsinki flight with Japan Air.  As I headed for departures I observed a very long file of people at the tail of which stood rather forlornly an official holding a pole atop which a placard announced that this was the end of the line.   Being a fluent speaker of American English I realised she meant queue so I joined it, not without an anxious look at my watch.

Almost simultaneously a ground hostess asked where I was going, looked at my boarding card and led me off to another entrance where there were only three people between me and the security rollers.  Thank you very much.  So I had time to relax before the flight.

Thanks to having to avoid Russian airspace what was a long flight is now three hours longer and several hundred pounds more expensive.  They served an indifferent dinner, I semi watched bits of some films, listened to music and watched time tick slowly away.  I dozed rather more successfully than I usually do on flights and eventually it was breakfast time.

In a complete contrast to dinner breakfast was wonderful.  It's the only meal I've ever had where I was given an instruction leaflet on how to eat it.

Then it was Helsinki and that's another post.