Ireland day 1326. Friday 16 May 2025- Kanazawa 2

Today’s summary	Another traditional Japanese breakfast then left the ryokan at about 9:30 am and walked down to the station. Spent a while at the ticket office sorting out travel arrangements for the next few days then made our ways to the Samurai quarter. Coffee and cakes at “Moron café(!) before going on to “Hands” department store to get me some reading glasses. Finished off at the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art for a look at The Swimming Pool – an upside down art installation by Leandro Erlich. Japanese Dinner at the Ryokan again in the evening
Today’s weather	Overcast and warm with hazy sun but some drizzly rain in the evening. Almost no wind. Appx 26c

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The blue line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Kanazawa station samurai spectacles swimming pool

Commentary

We only have two full days in Kanazawa, so today was the last opportunity of this trip to take in some of the sights that we hadn’t managed to explore yesterday. So, as has become our habit since we left Malahide, we got up early and sorted ourselves out before having a traditional Japanese breakfast again. True to form, it was enjoyable and nutritious, even if the gastropods did take a bit of stomaching.

We had finished and got ourselves ready to head out by 9:30am, so we didn’t hang around and set straight off for day two of our explorations. Our first stop was the railway station where we wanted to sort out our travel arrangements for the next few days. We have found train ticket machines incomprehensible (though I must admit we haven’t tried very hard) and ticketing apps useless. The staff in the JR ticket offices have, in contrast, been super helpful and professional, so we have tended to use them to book all our rail based travel.

Eventually we were done, and we came out of the office clutching a sheaf of tickets which should see us sorted out for most of the next week. Next on our agenda was the Samurai Quarter. This was the area of Kanazawa where the Samurai class lived, until the system disappeared in the mid-1800s. The Samurai were accorded special housing privileges, which was all very well but the quid pro quo was they were expected to fight in battle whenever needed and quite often didn’t survive.

Some of the samurai houses are well preserved and are open to the public. We went in one which was run by an elderly lady who explained that her great-grandfather had actually owned and lived in this house – possibly just too young to be an actual samurai, though.

After the session with the samurai, we dropped into the delightfully named “Moron” café for a very welcome cappuccino and western-style piece of carrot cake. I’m sure “Moron” means something more becoming in Japanese than it does in English!

Suitably refreshed, our next stop was a nearby “Hands” department store. I wanted to get some new reading glasses. Not because there was anything wrong with my old ones, but because a couple of days ago I temporarily mislaid them (Val subsequently discovered that I had put them for safely under a bush on our patio garden – it’s a long story) and I realised that it would have been pretty calamitous if I had really lost them and hadn’t got a spare pair. Anyway I eventually located a pair which I think were quite suitable, though at ¥4400 (about £25 / €30) they weren’t cheap. But Val says they look OK, so they are clearly ticking at least some of the right boxes.

We rounded off our day out with a quick visit to the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art which was, a bit like its equivalent in Kyoto, quite frankly disappointing. But then maybe I’m just a Philistine who doesn’t appreciate the finer things in life. We both did however like one installation, entitled “The Swimming Pool” by Leandro Erlich. It looks like a normal pool from the top, but the water is only 10cm deep on top of a Perspex sheet which sits on top of a blue painted empty tank, which you can actually go into. So you can stand in the tank and look up, through the layer of water, and look at the people above looking down – and of course vice versa. It’s quite a simple idea, but remarkably effective.

From the museum, we walked back to the Ryokan, following the edge of the Kenrokuen garden and the retracing some of the same route back as we had walked yesterday. En route we walked past the local fire-station – complete with the two dinky little, but shiny-clean fire engines that you can see in the banner image to this blog.

We were greeted at the ryoken by a flotilla of delightful staff, who also brought matcha tea and Japanese snacks to our room shortly after we arrived. Then, dinner was, once again, a re-run of yesterday’s. A multi-course meal of traditional Japanese food, featuring a lot of seafood and other unidentifiable blobs of protein. Beautifully prepared and surely highly nutritious. But I was slightly left with a craving for burger and chips afterwards.

Well that just about rounds off the summary of the day’s proceedings. I should probably be heading to bed – Val already has. But if truth be told, I’m not actually feeling that tired. Probably on account of the brief sleep I had on a park bench in between buying my glasses and going to look at the swimming pool. All due to the early start and the seductively mild temperatures, I’m sure. And of course definitely not age-related in any way at all.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


JR Ticket office – we were going to take the stopping coast train to Toyama tomorrow but the service isn’t operated by JR trains so you have to get the tickets from a different machine. We took the easy way out and booked a JR Shinkansen instead	Samurai suit of armour. I always felt they looked pretty sinister- you wouldn’t want to encounter someone wearing one in a dark alley

The samurai’s house was anything but sinister, though. In fact this particular one was delightful	I’m not sure which marketing agency came up with the name, but it certainly proved to be a bit of a head-turner

Looking down on Leandro Erlich’s pool in the contemporary art museum. It’s not what it seems..	..as Val subsequently demonstrated

Trying out the new eyewear just before I fell asleep on a park bench. I really am that old