Kanazawa Castle

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

We had a breakfast buffet this morning at the hotel. It had Western and Japanese food. Mike and Keith tried the cold rolled eggs, and Mike commented that it proved they can cook eggs; they just don’t want to. The “scrambled” eggs were the runniest I’ve ever encountered. Keith found a wonderful curry sauce to put on rice and Kristine doesn’t like nighttime food for breakfast. All of that sounds whiny, but we all really enjoyed breakfast.

Next, we set off to see the castle. We took the bus since we learned about it yesterday and arrived very quickly. We decided to go to the adjacent gardens since the weather was nice. It had been forecast to rain all day, so we were feeling lucky. Kristine and I quickly agreed that this was the best garden that we have been to.

They sweep the leaves from the tender ground cover. Cherry trees are everywhere – you feel like you are floating in pink clouds – but there is room for plum blossoms as well.

Since it was after noon when we wrapped up with the garden, we decided to go to the Gold Leaf Museum before the castle, so we could look for something to eat. As we started down the hill I found the most beautiful piece of chocolate ever. It looked like a little ice cream bar but way more beautiful. If you look closely at it, you can see that there are tiny specs of gold leaf in it. I told Keith he had to buy it for himself. It was shiny and blue and had pearls. The lady inexplicably handed it to me, so I ate the vast majority of it. It was delicious. I wish everyone had one. When we travel in Europe, we are dazzled by the fabulous chocolate everywhere we go, but candy, especially chocolate, is not really a thing around here. There are boxes of wrapped candy that we don’t really understand, but just-go-ahead-and-eat-some candy isn’t really around.

I will neither confirm nor deny that people ate hamburgers again. Sometimes hamburgers come wrapped in lettuce. Sometimes they come with teriyaki sauce and mushrooms. Sometimes logos are really cute. Keith is convinced that hamburgers are Japanese food, because they are everywhere (and are really good).

We all really like gold leaf, so we all really liked the Gold Leaf Museum. It turns out gold leaf is actually a mixture of gold, silver, and copper. The mixture is melted and poured it into bars and then run through some kind of a machine dealy that smooshes it flatter and flatter, and then it is put between special paper and pounded and pounded and pounded until it is super flat. I’m guessing you could have figured that out without going to the museum and I am simplifying it a bit, but every bit of it was beautiful. Kanazawa has long been the center of gold leaf production – in fact the town got its name because of it. Kane is the old word for gold, so the Kana part of the name comes from that.

We walked around the castle for quite a while. Japanese palaces are interesting because they are low buildings – there are just a lot of them. The original Palace that they are starting to work on reconstructing had a total of something like 30 or 40 or 50,000 square feet.

We found a maker’s mark on one of the stones.

Then we found a wall full of them. Kris considered that maybe they were part of the IKEA directions for stone walls: star goes over circle goes over check mark.

Kristine and I helped by putting in support stones. Hers is a little bigger and mine is not.

Planning the route home in the drippy rain.

We thought maybe we could get Paramount+ to work on our TVs. So, we gathered in Mike and Kristine’s room for a Survivor watching party. It would be last week’s episode, which we have cleverly avoided finding out who got voted off. Kristine, Mike and Keith all had knowledge about how to make it go from their phones to the TV using secret ways and not secret ways, but none of them worked. Oh well.

I saw these lovely aluminum plates. Beautiful plain and beautiful blossoms and nature and DINOSAUR! It made me burst out laughing.

Well, no, there wouldn’t be. There never is. You have to keep all your trash and throw it away when you get home (or to your hotel).

This art bird is in the cafe on the way to the train station/bus. Re-using is best!

I didn’t even know this happened until I went looking for pictures.

Keith has chosen this as his Japan car.

A fire truck zoomed out of the fire station right in front of us. Very exciting.