Breakfast
Our ryokan hotel experience ended with a kaiseki breakfast. We were served a very traditional Japanese breakfast with many fermented foods, local yogurt with local jam, miso soup, Japanese omelette, salt-grilled trout, sweet simmer black beans, rice, and very sticky, slimy fermented soybeans.
Hiking
From our our hotel, we went out on a nice hour long hike to some waterfalls at the top of the mountain. We had to ring a bear bell a few times along the way to ensure there were no bears on the trail. There were 230 bear attacks last year and 17 deaths.
Train
We had a couple more train trips on our way to Kanazawa. First it was an express train to Nagano. In the Nagano station we were picking up some lunch and everyone’s phones alerted at exactly the same time. It was an early warning for a pending earthquake. Two strong earthquakes hit not far away from our location. The first was a magnitude 5.0 and the second was 5.1. Everyone seemed to stop, look at the alert, and then go about with whatever they were doing. If the locals weren’t worried, we didn’t worry too much. From Nagano, we took a bullet train directly to Kanazawa.
Kanazawa
Once in Kanazawa we got ourselves organized before breaking off from the group to explore a little bit of the city. After striking out on our own and trying to find the conveyor belt sushi restaurant, we stumbled upon a Chinese restaurant to have some noodle dishes with what turned out to be mystery meat. Matt discovered a cocktail bar he wanted to try, so we walked about 20 minutes through some nice residential areas before arriving at an area with narrow streets and small shops and restaurants. The bar was on the second floor above a restaurant with a dark interior. The place is owned by two half French, half Japanese brothers. They have a menu of all unique cocktails with a Japanese twist. They dedicate a portion of their restaurant to local artists. We enjoyed the art on the walls so much we purchased one of the watercolors on display. While sitting at the bar we were able to meet a few people from different areas of Canada and San Francisco.
