Kanazawa

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

it just cannot be overstated how great Mike has been at organizing our transportation. Kristine and I love watching Keith and Mike stand at machines or talk to transportation people while we do nothing at all.

We took two different trains from Kyoto to Kanazawa this morning. It was great to see the countryside – which had only a few spots without houses. The clouds were flirting with the mountains, but I could never get a good picture. I gave up trying and just enjoyed it.

We checked into our hotel which is barely outside the train station. The room is enormous, especially by Japanese standards. We have space to put the suitcase that isn’t right on the bed. None of our other hotel rooms have had that much space. We have a little kitchen-ish area that we will not be using but it makes it feel very luxurious.

The lobby offers free soft drinks and alcohol from 11:00 to 8:00. Every day. We tried the apple soda, then went back into the train station and adjacent mall to look for lunch.

It said there was a dining area on floor 6, so off we went. I saw giant cute stuffies- first sign of Japanese cute culture that I’ve seen.

The very first restaurant we saw at the top of the escalator turned out to be the answer to everyone’s desires. It is a type of dining called shabu-shabu. It is cooking at your table in liquid (not oil). Mike had heard of it but had never done it. You could order pork and or beef, then have as many vegetables of your choosing. We got to choose two different soups to cook in. We chose a chicken stock and a spicy something. I never got around to trying the chicken stock because the spicy something was wonderful. This is everything I wanted Japanese food to be. We dipped our vegetables and meats into the boiling water and cooked our lunch. Everything was delicious. Kristine was really jamming on the peanut sauce until I introduced her to crunchy soy sauce. It was lots of sesame seeds (I think) in soy sauce. It was absolutely delicious. There’s a 90-minute time limit for you to eat. They will refill your soup as much as you want. We ordered the standard meals, each getting 6 slices each of beef and pork. We could have ordered all we could eat, but we figured what we saw on the picture was really all we could eat. We were right.

We are getting pretty good at converting yen to dollars. It’s not hard…you take off the last two digits and then take 2/3 of what’s left. I still didn’t quite believe what our bill was going to be until after Keith paid it and confirmed that we had eaten for over an hour and were stuffed for just under $9/apiece.

The price of food has been extremely reasonable everywhere we’ve been. Finding things we want to eat has been a little more challenging. They don’t seem to want to give you the white meat of a chicken – they would rather give you the parts that we normally cut off and throw away. It is super interesting to me that nearly all the restaurants – and there are many, many restaurants – are Japanese food. Now, I get that I’m in Japan, but I’ve never traveled anywhere else that I couldn’t find a variety of types of foods. Even in our tiny town in Wales we had Chinese food and random fried food and pizza and fish and chips as well as here’s just a regular menu full of stuff from everywhere places. Here, it’s just Japanese food. And two burger places.

While I’m on the subject of food, let me mention that there are no napkins in Japan. It is entirely weird. Kristine said she’s a four napkin girl and I heartily concur with that number. She said one for her lap, one to fall on the floor, one to use for her hands, and then just another one. I think that’s about perfect. I looked up on the internet why there are no napkins and it said because Japanese people eat carefully and slowly and do not need napkins. They generally do not eat finger food, I guess. Hamburgers and pizza don’t figure into their regular diets. What about the spicy chips I have been getting from 7-11? People need a napkin after those. Anyway, there were boxes of Kleenex at the ramen place where we ate, that we were supposed to use as napkins, because ramen is apparently a messy food. Kleenex. To use as napkins. Um. No. They do sometimes give you a really nice wet wipe that you are supposed to use to wash your hands before you eat that we save to use as napkins at the end of the meal. If we find a napkin anywhere, we take it and keep it for emergencies.

We went out walking in the town and got caught in a thunderstorm. We found a good spot to shelter and it didn’t last long.

We mosied here and there and saw lots of cherry blossoms. We stopped in a little park that had a view of some of the original double walls that had once surrounded the town. There were benches under cover at a bathroom. Japan is winning bathrooms. Everywhere we’ve been there are ample, clean bathrooms for free. Europe could take a lesson from Japan. The United States could take a lesson from Japan.

We have no idea why there are footstep spots in the road. Keith accused Kristine of doing it wrong. She said she was waiting for two friends.

We sat on the benches for a while and chatted, listened to a little music, and enjoyed the quiet surroundings of the park. We moved on, got a block away and the skies opened up. We jumped on a bus and came back to the hotel. Mike knew how to use our IC cards to pay for the bus and which bus we should take. He is wonderful.