The Rynearsons in Japan 2: The Next Few Days

Another day, another garden.  We headed into the heart of the city, caffeinated my parents at a Starbucks, and visited the Imperial Palace gardens.  I've been in places in Tokyo that say pretty loudly "Money" (there is an Aston Martin dealership down the street from the school's condo, and there are two more in the city) but the district around the Imperial Gardens really belts it out.  We walked through some awfully ritzy neighborhoods before arriving at the gardens.  My impression, distilled from an hours-long tour, is that the stonework is really the highlight of the place.  There are some places were they've done neat things with the plants, but nothing really tops huge walls made by hand out of perfectly shaped 20-ton blocks.  The fortifications are mostly absent, having burned down hundreds of years ago in some cases and more recently in others, but the foundations and stones are there and they are really impressive.  Ana was looking for a letterboxing location that happens to exist in the garden, and I'm happy to report that it was found and papers stamped with various stamps and whatnot. The pictures of the garden are a better bet than my descriptions.

 Rocks that rock - that is a full-size tree behind them

An area of the Imperial gardens with a smaller proportion of rocks

 Serious walls

Letterboxing supplies retrieval

After visiting the Gardens, we went back into the really ritzy district looking for lunch.  We toured through several floors of the very, very fancy mall  / subway station before settling on a Chinese place for lunch, which was very decent quality for the price and quite enjoyable.  I think everyone had plenty to eat, and then we retrieved our bags from the coin lockers (stashed so we didn't need to go back to the condo) and caught the train back to Kanazawa.  I think most people slept through most of that trip, and six hours later we got off the bus we'd taken from Kanazawa Station to our apartment, where we fed my parents pre-prepared pasta and sauce and collapsed into sleep.

Good Chinese food

The next day Ana and I both had work, so we left my parents briefly to their own devices in the morning.  When it was getting close to lunchtime, Ana went home and guided them from the apartment to campus, where we showed them our lovely concrete and the few gardens on campus.  That accomplished, we went to a rotating sushi bar for lunch.  If you're not familiar with rotating sushi bars, instead of ordering there is a track that goes around the entire room, with food that constantly circulates.  If you see something you like, snag it off the track and eat it, and color-coded plates will let the waitstaff tally up the cost correctly at the end.  There is a menu and you can order specific things from the staff hanging out in the center of the track, but that's less fun.  After lunch, Ana and I went back to work and sent my parents downtown to our local major garden, Kenroku'en, that being the second of the big three.  As you can see, Kanazawa was, as usual, gray and dreary. 

 Back in Kanazawa

 KIT gardens

 

 Apartment view

We regrouped around dinnertime and walked down to a local okonomiyaki place, which we described in some detail in our second-ever blog post.  Between Ana and I we interpreted more than enough of the menu, and remembered enough about how to cook okonomiyaki on the hibachi table, to allow dinner to be a success.  We have a couple of crappy cell phone pictures.

 Not remotely Japanese pizza