Wednesday, October 30
We were hoping for a simple breakfast…until we saw the spread laid out for us.
Scallop soup, clam soup, Hida beef with scallions, tuna Sashimi, some magical miso heated on a banana leaf, dried fish, yoghurt with dragonfruit…and several things I’m forgetting. We promised not to eat for a week.
The staff couldn’t have been lovelier or more accommodating. There had been a slight mixup on our arrival: I had actually booked two cottages, but the young woman in charge had insisted that one of the reservations was for a suite of rooms. As we left she told me that she had made a mistake and, as she repeated more times than I could count, she was horribly, terribly, unforgivably sorry! The Bans had been delighted with their accommodations, and I told her so, but nothing seemed to assuage her dismay. As we pulled away in the inn’s van, she and two of her colleagues stood and waved until we were out of sight.
The van brought us back to Takayama. We stuffed our bags into some lockers at the train station and hoofed it into the old town. There isn’t a lot left of the old town, but what there is is beautifully preserved: traditional Japanese wooden houses with tile roofs.
The town was pretty full of tourists, at least as many of them Japanese as European (we’ve seen almost no Chinese tourists). And the Main Street was lined with shops catering to the many visitors. We eventually wandered into a less touristed part of town, but decided that we’d seen what there was to see. Spoiler alert: Sue started out on a shopping odyssey here that took her to the last day in Osaka. She picked out two gorgeous sake glasses for a couple of our near acquaintance. As soon as she was on the train she asked herself why she hadn’t purchased four of them. And so began a quest…
We weren’t able to get reserved seats on the train back to Toyoma, so we queued early to be safe. The train was scandalously late getting into Toyoma—3 minutes occasions repeated apologies—but we had enough time to make the Shinkansen to Kanazawa.
I had read many times that Kanazawa was the favorite city of many visitors, and the train station certainly made a good first impression!
I wasn’t expecting much from our hotel, the Hotel Nikko Kanazawa, in that it seemed to be a terrific bargain…but it turned out to be spectacular! Wonderfully spacious lobby, great rooms, and two “skyscraper” bars on the 29th and 30th floors with views over the entire city. The best thing, though, was the staff. What a change after the indifferent attitudes at our hotel in Tokyo. Every staff member was not just eager to help, but to go an extra mile; whatever they might have thought about the Gai-Jin in private, they certainly conveyed the impression that they were eager to make our stay a delight.
The coupons for four free drinks didn’t hurt, either. Sue and I went for a reconnoitering walk and made it to the very edge of the castle park and back through the busy downtown shopping district as darkness fell. Although there are about 488,000 Kanazawans, the city radiates a kind of calm and satisfaction. The buildings are much nicer than the great majority of those in Tokyo, the streets and boulevards more suited to strolling.
The hotel concierge had booked us at a very traditional, casual restaurant near the hotel. We were given our own enclosed table with a view of the sushi bar (we had wanted sushi tonight, but the fish market was closed and, ergo, so were all the real sushi joints). We ordered a wild variety of things, from omelets through seafood dumplings, duck stew through fatty tuna maki, vegetables and flying fish roe with collagen jelly through make-it-yourself maki with snow crab and raw egg. Really good!