Kanazawa Medley

I took Jonathan and Carrie around Kanazawa for a week, and here are some of the pictures and video that resulted. If you're a faithful follower of the blog you've seen some shots of most of these places, but there's always room to get a better angle. Look at this as an advertisement for coming to visit me. You will have this much fun if you come.

After that, a quick explanation/rant about the frustratingly different way Japan approaches winter.

Impromptu jamming with two German pilots and the Japanese bartender.


I'm not doing the cool guitar at the end here, that's Nitta-san, the bartender

Magazine shots at the 21st Century Art Museum

The Turell Room at the Museum. The museum commissioned several works to be a permanent part of the structure as it was getting built.

Carrie takes the Comb Car for a spin.

The inevitable and epic karaoke. This was "Rain on My Parade".

Sometimes it's just a two-shirt night.

Matching deer hats in the snow.

The amazing staff at my favorite yakitori place.

Kenrokuen Gardens in winter.

Trees all over the city are bound up with ropes in this style. It's called "yukitsuri" and it's to protect the trees from heavy snows, although it's also for the aesthetic effect.

I've spent the last 15 winters at 7600 feet in Colorado or in Chicago. It doesn't get anywhere near as cold here as it does there, just a little below freezing. However, I experience the sensation of being cold much much more here.

On the big northern island of Hokkaido, they build their houses with insulation and have central heating because of how cold it gets there. Down on most parts of the main island, however, they've chosen to discard with those luxuries. The houses are built with extremely thin walls and there is never any central heating. This means that after a day at school I come back home and my apartment is only a few degrees warmer than the outside.

People use different methods to combat this problem, from electric and kerosene heaters to boiling pots of water. I don't really like the idea of the kerosene heaters, even though they're the most effective, so I have put up some homemade insulation behind the kitchen curtains where I have those big windows and switched on some combination of three space heaters. This combined with heavy socks, sweaters, and cut-off gloves gets me through pretty comfortably.

But holy hell Creighton, I hear you asking, why don't they at least insulate their houses? The reason I have heard quoted is quite dumb. It is that because of the possibility of earthquakes, they want the walls to be lighter so they have less of a chance of crushing someone. Yup.

Even if that made any sense, there are very few earthquakes here in Ishikawa. I believe that there's also some element of pride at work, not wanting to admit flaws in the system.

Another bizarre thing (to me) is the way they clear snow from the roads. Since it theoretically doesn't get cold enough to really ice up the roads, there are little sprinklers down almost every street in Kanazawa. They don't do this in ever city in Japan, but it gets pretty comical here. They wash away the snow with thousands upon thousands of gallons of water, leaving huge lakes on the edge of the roads where they dip down. I've been splashed more than a few times.

These are all things to adapt to, and as much as I think they're absurd, they aren't changing anytime fast. And it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it does my thin-skinned California friends....

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The Best New Year's of My Life

Here's my Kyoto and Nara update from my trip over New Year's!  I'm slowly getting myself in gear here, hope you enjoy....

We left Tokyo in the late afternoon, headed for Kyoto on the Shinkansen (high-speed train) on December 30th.  We bought unreserved seat tickets, because they're the cheapest.  The Shinkansen gets you through the 550 km journey in about 2 hours, and costs about $140 US per person. 

Trouble is, we didn't take into account the fact that December 30th is one of the biggest travel days of the year because of the spiritual and familial significance of the New Year holiday to the Japanese, and unreserved seating means that people can board until there's no room, almost overloading the train.  When we got on we realized that there was no more room in the unreserved cars, so we had to end up sitting on the floor in between cars.  I had to do this on a TGV train in France once, and while it's no picnic, at least the ride isn't too long.  We tried to remember the rules to Go Fish with our deck of cards and snuck peeks at the people in First Class like homeless urchins in 19th Century England.

Kyoto is a fantastic city, and I hope to return many times.  The US made a decision to not bomb the city during World War II, so it retains a huge amount of Japanese cultural heritage sites; it's also quite sophisticated and modern, often feeling European.  We spent the 31st going around on rented bikes and seeing a couple of temples before finding a temple to go to for midnight.

 The old Imperial Palace. Kyoto at one point was the capital of Japan.

 

 

 

 Heianji Temple

 

 

 

The giant torii gate near Heianji that was built in the late 19th Century.  Jonathan and Carrie are on bikes at the bottom if you can pick them out.

From the restaurant where we had lunch.

 

The Japanese mostly do one of two things on New Year's Eve; either they sit at home with family and watch the hyperactive and overstimulating ball-dropping TV specials or they go to a temple and wait for midnight to throw a coin to the altar and make the first prayer of the new year.  We clearly did the latter, and picked Kiyomizudera.  It sits high up on a hill above the main city and was absolutely stunning lit up at night. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We sat out on one of the main balconies with hundreds of mostly younger Japanese people, and as it approached midnight, soft flakes of snow began to drift down.  I would probably not use the word "magical" for it, but it was quite affecting. 

New Year's in the States is always so built up that it has invariably been a disappointment for me.  You have to go to the best bar, find the coolest party, have the best night of your life.  In Japan it's much more low-key, and it doesn't hurt to be able to spend midnight at such a majestic place.

Everyone on the balcony counted down from 10, there were (sort of thankfully) no fireworks, and 2010 began.  Then everyone surged towards the altar behind me.  It took me probably 15 minutes to get 20 feet to throw a coin in, clap my hands twice, and say a prayer (this is how I poorly ape the proper custom, I'm not sure if I do it right).  The crush of people was a bit annoying, but we eventually got free and made our way into the downtown area. 

I had been told that everyone went home after midnight in Japan, but we certainly found some good bars to go and had a good time.

A sort of wreath hung over many doorways and on some cars around shogatsu (New Year's)

The next day it was off to Nara, about 45 minutes south of Kyoto and home to the largest steel Buddha in the world.  Nara is often overlooked by the casual foreign traveler, but I'd heard great things from friends.  It did not disappoint.

The mascot of Nara is this rather creepy individual, who followed us everywhere, from posters to giftshops to charms on backpacks and phones.

 It's the 1300 year anniversary of the city of Nara.  Holy crap.  Before Kyoto, Nara was the capital of Japan around the 8th Century.

I blew this up so you could see the fantastic Engrish.

Why does he have antlers, I hear you asking?  Well, because the main temple and shrine of Nara sit in a large park/forest where the native deer have been turned into what amounts to pets.  Fat, vaguely vapid looking pets.  For 100 yen, you can buy a packet of wafers to feed them.  They pretty much just hang out and give a very surreal vibe to the area.

 'Sup, deer.

 

They're looking at a similar huge wooden statue behind me.

First stop was Todaiji, and it was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen.  It's impossible to capture the scale of the place, and what it's like to walk up to the main building as it looms larger and larger over you.  Incidentally, it is the apparently the largest standing wooden structure in the world. 

 

I didn't take any pictures of the Daibutsu (big Buddha statue) because it's supposed to be bad luck and seemed a bit disrespectful.  You can find pictures online easily by Googling "Nara daibutsu", though.  Here are some pictures of the rest of the inside of the temple.

 The way the temple used to look before it was burned and reconstructed several hundred years ago.  It is now only two-thirds the original size.

 

The next picture is going to take some explanation, because otherwise it will look impossibly stupid.  Near the exit, some monks were soliciting donations to pay for temple restoration.  If you paid 1000 yen, you could write your name, country, date, and a wish.  We observed some Japanese people writing elegant kanji on the tiles, and I thought it would be a cool thing for us to do.

I started, using a calligraphy brush and ink, and quickly saw the results of how rarely I use brushes.  My name looked like a 6 year old wrote it.  Jonathan went next, and being something of a painter came off much better.  However, we had awkwardly taken up two-thirds of the tile with just our names.  Carrie managed to save some space.  Then she began to write the date. "D-e-c...oh, crap!"  As it was of course January 1 and we were writing in ink, we now had to begin our wish with "Dec".  A fairly intense and unproductive discussion followed.  I won't bore you with the details, and it will probably never be as funny in the telling as it was in doing, but we ended up coming to the moderately asinine and linguistically obtuse "Dedicated to friendship".

Is that even a wish?

For some unfathomable reason, I grabbed the brush to write our "wish".  That's why it looks like it was written by a poodle with ADHD.  Nice straight lines, Creighton.

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We didn't stop laughing for a good half hour; I imagine we confirmed every stereotype of gaijin held by the Japanese.

Along the way to the next area with the main shrine of Nara, we found some pretty stellar deer-head hats and all bought them, because...well, because sometimes it's just better to embrace your inner tourist.

At the shrine I bought a good-luck New Year's arrow and we sampled some greasy festival food on the way out.  (Fun fact: pretty much all of the festival food booths are run by the Yakuza, the Japanese Mob.  This is pretty much accepted and is not a big deal at all.)

 

 

 

 

 

On the morning of the 2nd, we went to one last big tourist site, Kinkakuji.  This is a popular name for the temple that means "Golden Temple" because, it's, well, covered in gold leaf.  It was certainly unique, although not as striking as some of the other sights we saw.

 

The new and pretty amazing Kyoto Station.

Then it was onto the highway bus to head back to Kanazawa.  When we got to my apartment Jonathan got a pretty great shot of me in front of my door.  I didn't know it looked like that...

Some interesting Kanazawa adventures ahead, including a traveling comb-car in the art museum and an impromptu rock performance by yours truly.

Oh, and karaoke.

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